AI antibiotics for superbugs could lead to ‘golden age of discovery’

Artificial intelligence has created two antibiotics that could herald a “golden age” in the fight against superbugs.

AI virtually invented more than 50 million compounds and investigated whether they could kill MRSA and gonorrhoea, two of the most common superbugs.

More than 52,000 people a year in the UK catch antibiotic-resistant infections, which cause around 2,000 deaths annually.

Antimicrobial resistance, which creates superbugs, has been called the “silent pandemic” and the problem of antibiotic resistance is set to get worse.

These deadly infections occur when a bacterium is treated with a drug but works out ways of neutralising the medicine.

The genetic protections make drugs less effective and can make common infections lethal.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) used AI to come up with completely new ways of targeting these pathogens in the hope of making a breakthrough against superbugs.

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