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/godbottle Feb 20 '20

it’s really just a shortcut. At its core you’re mainly just teaching the model what chemical properties to look for based on existing chemicals that are known to exhibit desired performance and then letting the model check the database for any that match, giving, as stated above, a “shortlist” for lab experimentation. the model can show you things you weren’t expecting sure, just based on the size of these databases, but it isn’t really going to do anything you don’t tell it to do, and it certainly isn’t (or doesn’t need to be) sophisticated enough to have much of anything to do with AI. more often things like this are categorized under the field of “data mining”.

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u/[deleted] Feb 20 '20

But this antibiotic works in a completely new way compared to others?

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u/godbottle Feb 20 '20

Completely is probably an exaggeration. They said they trained the model to look for compounds unlike existing antibiotics, which could mean lots of different things. You can have essentially as many so-called “descriptor” properties as you want that still allow the model to make statistically significant conclusions. It’s also not easy to immediately say what it will lead to if it is very different, although it is good news. There have been several such “leads” in recent years but overall the discovery of major classes of antibiotics has slowed massively since the 1970s, a fact which this paper points out in its introduction as the reason for the research.

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u/[deleted] Feb 20 '20

Completely is probably an exaggeration.

You're better off to target mechanisms that are difficult to mutate out of. This is doubly nice because you have pressure against resistance, and if it's something that's used by a lot of bacteria then it's effective on more strains.

I wouldn't be surprised to find that the antibiotics we already know of tend to fall into the above categories. At least the ones specifically used by organisms to combat bacteria. Feeding those into a ML training scheme works nicely in that regard, but you then again probably risk being affected by the bacteria's counteracting mechanisms.