Artificial Intelligence Develops New Drugs for Antibiotic-Resistant--

Artificial Intelligence will play an excellent role in the pharmaceutical industry and research. The analysis, research and synthesis were time-consuming and were very expensive in the past.

But, with the advent of artificial intelligence- tools, the synthesis and identification of new molecules will be speedy.

Artificial Intelligence can predict the properties of new molecules. And can suggest efficient synthetic routes of synthesis.

AI can predict which molecules can bind to specific protein sites in the body. And, this step is important in the field of drug design.

At the time of the pandemic, the AI Company BenevolentAI synthesized the compound ‘Baricitinib’, which was efficient, in the treatment of COVID-19.

SyntheMol is a new AI model developed by Scientists at Stanford Medicine. This model helps chemists in the synthesis of new drugs in the laboratory.

When we use an anti-bacterial drug for a long time, the bacteria develop resistance against the drug. The same thing happened in the case of Cinetobacter baumannii. The infection of this bacteria leads to the death of many people. The reason was the bacteria had developed resistance against the prevalent drugs. The researcher employed the AI machine to prepare new drugs to fight bacterial infection.

We need several new drugs to fight against various infections.

“We hypothesised that there are a lot of potential molecules out there that could be effective drugs, but we haven’t made or tested them yet. That’s why we wanted to use AI to design entirely new molecules that have never been seen in nature,” said James Zou, PhD, an associate professor of biomedical data science and co-senior author of the study.

“Chemical space is gigantic, and they have estimated that there are close to 10⁶⁰ possible drug-like molecules. But still, they remain unexplored, and there is entire space for it,” said Kyle Swanson, a Stanford computational science doctoral student and co-lead author of the study.

SyntheMol is an AI tool. It ensures that the molecules the model finds are available in a laboratory.

This AI -model ‘SyntheMol’ can find and design potential drugs using a library of- more than 130,000 molecular building blocks. It generates the final compound and shows the steps to build the final drug molecule.

“Now we have not just entirely new molecules but also explicit instructions for how to make those molecules,” Zou said.

The scientists tested the drugs explored by the AI model for toxicity in mice. The drug molecule they tested seemed safe.

‘The next step is to test the drug in mice infected with A. baumannii. It was to see whether it works in a living body”, Zou said.

“This AI is designing and teaching us about this entirely new part of the chemical space that humans haven’t explored before,” Zou said.

The chemists Zou and Swanson are also refining SyntheMol and broadening its reach. They’re collaborating with other research groups to use the model for drug discovery for heart disease.