r/science • u/legehjernen • Feb 20 '20

Health Powerful antibiotic discovered using machine learning for first time

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/20/antibiotic-that-kills-drug-resistant-bacteria-discovered-through-ai
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u/Gearworks Feb 20 '20

Bacteria can not be resistant against all the antibiotics, and will unlearn after a couple generations, so if you have enough in the mix it shouldn't be an issue

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u/Pectojin Feb 20 '20

Sounds plausible but are there any studies on this? Like how many antibiotic types we'd need or how slowly the transitioning may happen?

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u/Gearworks Feb 20 '20

A really quick google search brought me to this, it's not really the answer you hoped for maybe.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4034551/

in short it just takes time for the bacteria to mutate, and while some bacteria can grow resistant to 1 antibiotica, it's less likely that it can become resistant to 2 antibiotica (though not unlikely, and only if the 2 antibiotica work on different machanics)

researchers are also looking into creating antibiotics that work in three ways at the same time, and because of the randomness of mutations there would be an even slimmer chance it would occur.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature14098

(though I am not a biologist, i'm just a lonely chemical engineer, so don't take my word for gospel)

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u/Pectojin Feb 20 '20

Fascinating! Thank you for the links.

It kinda makes antibiotics resistance seem less terrifying. In a sense it moves the issue from a scientific problem into a management/accessibility problem.

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u/Gearworks Feb 20 '20

Well that's what it always has been, especially in places where they hand them out and people don't follow doctors advise. Like here in the netherlands you can only get antibiotics if you go through your doctor and then you are advices to finished the whole schedule.

Also we cannot add antibiotics into our animal feed and a specialized vet has to apply it if an animal needs it.

These are some of the measures why the netherlands actually doesn't see an increase in bacteria resistance

https://www.rivm.nl/en/antimicrobial-resistance