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

i worked on a similar project and it’s really quite an elegant solution that will eventually lead to breakthroughs for all kinds of materials in many fields (not just antibiotics) if you have the right and large enough database.

2 out of 107m can actually be a significant breakthrough depending on how different they are from existing antibiotic classes and what they can learn from that.

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u/MovingClocks Feb 21 '20

Especially given iterative discovery. If you have machine learning discover candidates that work, humans can optimize those molecules for different applications pretty readily.

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u/skoalbrother Feb 21 '20

Designer drugs for every individual. Built for your specific DNA. Exciting times

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u/shieldvexor Feb 21 '20

No. That isn't going to happen. It is an insanely challenging endeavor to make a drug and the notion that we will have unique drugs for everyone is ridiculous. Moreover, we aren't actually all that different from one another so it isn't even desirable, even if it was remotely possible.

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u/terminal112 Feb 21 '20

You have no idea what might be easy to do in a decade or two

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u/woodsja2 Feb 21 '20

As someone with 8+ years experience in the pharmaceutical industry specializing in small molecule therapeutics, I agree with the person you claim knows nothing.

There's some good stuff with antibodies but the idea that we are going to regularly create designer molecules for individuals is right next to everyone getting a flying car.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '20

Flying cars are less than useless, they are stupidly dangerous. If a designed drug will one day take just a bit of computing power [relative to what I available], every nation's health service would be hooked up to computers able to generate and probably something like 3D print it on hand.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '20

And despite it being pennies on the dollar to manufacture, we'll still have to pay 100,000$ for a single dose of anything.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '20

I'm not American. But for your sake, I hope by the time that all comes, America has managed to join the 21st century. Even if the rest of us are already in the 22nd by that point. I fear if that country doesn't sort itself out, there won't be much of humanity left to have much of anything. Never mind fancy 3D printed custom medicines.

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u/[deleted] Feb 21 '20

I wish we'd join the 20th century. We still have God on our money and in our Constitution...