Acinetobacter baumannii

Subject : Science and technology

Section: Biotechnology

Concept :

In a major breakthrough for the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the field of medicine, scientists from the United States and Canada have found a new antibiotic – powerful enough to kill a superbug – using AI.

Superbugs

Superbugs are bacteria that are resistant to several types of antibiotics. Each year these drug-resistant bacteria infect more than 2 million people in the US and kill at least 23,000, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Acinetobacter baumannii

The dealt with the bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii.
In 2017, the bacterium was identified by the World Health Organization (WHO) as one of the world’s most dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
baumannii can cause pneumonia, meningitis and infect wounds, all of which can lead to death.
baumanni is usually found in hospital settings, where it can survive on surfaces for long periods.

How do bacteria become resistant to drugs?

Antibiotics are medicines used to prevent and treat bacterial infections.
Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria change in response to the use of these medicines.
This ultimately threatens the ability of medicines to treat common infectious diseases.

How did researchers use AI in this case?

Narrowing down the right antibacterial chemicals against bacteria can be a long, difficult process.
This is where algorithms come in because the concept of AI is based on the process of machines being given large amounts of data and training themselves on identifying patterns and solutions based on them.
The researchers first exposed A. baumannii grown in a lab dish to about 7,500 different chemical compounds, to see which ones could help pause the growth of the bacterium.
Then they fed the structure of each molecule into the machine-learning model.
They also told the model whether each structure could prevent bacterial growth or not.
This allowed the algorithm to learn chemical features associated with growth inhibition.
Once the model was trained, the researchers used it to analyse a set of 6,680 compounds.
This analysis took less than two hours and yielded a few hundred results.
Of these, the researchers chose 240 to test experimentally in the lab, focusing on compounds with structures that were different from those of existing antibiotics.
Those tests yielded nine antibiotics, including one that was very potent and effective at killing A. baumannii.
This has been named abaucin.