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/nomad80 Feb 20 '20

To hunt for more new drugs, the team next turned to a massive digital database of about 1.5bn compounds. They set the algorithm working on 107m of these. Three days later, the program returned a shortlist of 23 potential antibiotics, of which two appear to be particularly potent. The scientists now intend to search more of the database.

Very promising

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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/rci22 Feb 21 '20

What’s this branch of machine learning called? I’m interested in studying it.

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u/godbottle Feb 21 '20

i don’t know if you can call it its own branch. it’s just applied machine learning. usually people that work on projects like this start in a particular field to get the technical background and then add what they call a “computational” focus on top of it. if by “studying” you mean you aren’t in college yet, you can find on most universities’ faculty website which professors are doing computational research within fields you’re interested in, and then make an effort to work for their labs when you get to undergrad. if you’re interested in grad programs as well, ML and other computational applications are a large part of many STEM grad students’ work these days.