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Antibiotic-resistance is increasing and older approaches to discovering new antibiotics (such as screening microbes in the soil) are not filling the void. A more recent approach — screening libraries of synthetically produced molecules — has proved cumbersome and relatively ineffective for finding new antibiotics.
A Boston-based team used artificial intelligence techniques to find new antibiotics faster and more effectively. They screened more than 100 million molecules and identified 8 new antibiotics that are structurally different from current antibiotics. For example, one molecule, called halicin, has bactericidal activity against many important pathogens, including 36 multidrug-resistant isolates of carbapenem-resistant Enterobacteriace…