By Stephen Beech via SWNS
Hundreds of thousands of potential sources of new antibiotics to fight deadly drug-resistant superbugs have been found in the natural world using artificial intelligence.
An international research team utilized machine learning to identify 863,498 “promising” antimicrobial peptides – small molecules that can kill or inhibit the growth of infectious microbes.
The findings of the study, published in the journal Cell, come amid a renewed focus on combatting antimicrobial resistance (AMR) as humanity contends with soaring numbers of “superbugs” resistant to current drugs.
Computational biologist Professor Luis Pedro Coelho, of the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), Australia, said: “There is an urgent need for new methods for antibiotic discovery.
“It is one of the top public health threats, killing 1.27 million people each year.”
Without intervention, it is estimated that AMR could cause up to 10 million deaths every year by 2050.
Coelho, a researcher at the QUT Centre for Microbiome Research which studies the structure and function of microbial communities, said: “Using artificial intelligence to understand and harness the power of the global microbiome will hopefully drive innovative research for better public health outcomes.”
Scientists verified the machine predictions by testing 100 laboratory-made peptides against clinically significant pathogens.
They found 79 disrupted bacterial membranes and 63 specifically targeted antibiotic-resistant bacteria such as Staphylococcus aureus and Escherichia coli.
Coelho said: “Moreover, some peptides helped to eliminate infections in mice; two in particular reduced bacteria by up to four orders of magnitude.”
In a pre-clinical model, tested on infected mice, treatment with the peptides produced results similar to the effects of polymyxin B – a commercially available antibiotic which is used to treat meningitis, pneumonia, sepsis, and urinary tract infections.
More than 60,000 metagenomes – a collection of genomes within a specific environment – which together contained the genetic makeup of over one million organisms, were analyzed to get the results.
Coelho added: “They came from sources across the globe including marine and soil environments, and human and animal guts.”
The resulting AMPSphere – a database comprising the new peptides – has been published as a publicly available, open-access resource for new antibiotic discovery.
