Antibiotic discovery in the artificial intelligence era

Abstract

As the global burden of antibiotic resistance continues to grow, creative approaches to antibiotic discovery are needed to accelerate the development of novel medicines. A rapidly progressing computational revolution—artificial intelligence—offers an optimistic path forward due to its ability to alleviate bottlenecks in the antibiotic discovery pipeline. In this review, we discuss how advancements in artificial intelligence are reinvigorating the adoption of past antibiotic discovery models—namely natural product exploration and small molecule screening. We then explore the application of contemporary machine learning approaches to emerging areas of antibiotic discovery, including antibacterial systems biology, drug combination development, antimicrobial peptide discovery, and mechanism of action prediction. Lastly, we propose a call to action for open access of high‐quality screening datasets and interdisciplinary collaboration to accelerate the rate at which machine learning models can be trained and new antibiotic drugs can be developed.

Harnessing of Artificial Intelligence for the Diagnosis and Prevention of Hospital-Acquired Infections: A Systematic Review

“…Alternatively, deep learning techniques such as the long short-term memory (LSTM) generative model and bidirectional LSTM (BiLSTM) classification models have also been employed in the design of novel AMP sequences [ 104 ]. These approaches have been systematically reviewed by a number of studies present in the literature [ 105 , 106 , 107 ].…”

Sensing of Antibiotic–Bacteria Interactions

“…Furthermore, in the realm of microscopy where image resolution holds a crucial role, the strategies for enhancing it have also notably transitioned from instrumentational upgrades to modern image processing techniques. In the contemporary world, the utilization of AI and ML is progressively gaining importance, encompassing the analysis of scientific data [ 163 ]. AI has garnered heightened interest and is being harnessed by chemists to execute diverse tasks in drug discovery [ 164 ].…”

Antimicrobial resistance crisis: could artificial intelligence be the solution?

“…AI technology constitutes a powerful tool to combat AMR [ 74 – 76 ]. For example, data-driven methods can be used to predict novel antibiotic compounds, while image-based methods can help identify resistant bacteria [ 77 ].…”