By Dr. Akhila Kosaraju
You’ve probably heard of artificial intelligence writing college admissions essays or producing authentic-looking “deep fake” images. Less discussed is AI’s potential to help us address health crises.
If deployed properly, AI could equip scientists with tools to fight the rise of drug-resistant superbugs.
Scientists predict that superbugs — bacteria and fungi that have developed resistance to existing medicines — could kill 10 million people per year by 2050.
Fortunately, AI has the potential to give humans a leg up on superbugs. But it’ll take the best efforts of the public and private sectors to ensure new drugs are accessible to patients — before it’s too late.
In 2019, superbugs were linked to the deaths of nearly 5 million people worldwide.
Despite this alarming trend, many large companies have stopped researching antimicrobials. That’s not due to lack of scientific promise. It’s because the process is often commercially infeasible. In fact, nearly all of the small companies that received FDA approval for a new antibiotic since 2017 have filed for bankruptcy, been bought out by another company, or shut their doors.
We need to attack this problem from two ends: optimizing the discovery of treatments and reshaping the antibiotic market with new incentives.
My company and our academic partners are working on the first part of the problem. Using AI, we’re developing new classes of antibiotics that treat the world’s most urgent threats. In days or weeks, AI can do discovery work that would take researchers months or years.
Here’s how it works. Researchers expose a pathogen to thousands of chemicals with diverse structures to determine which ones prevent bacterial growth. They use the results to train an AI model to predict which new chemical compounds might be similarly effective.
Researchers then bombard the model with millions to billions of possible molecular structures. AI can virtually screen millions of molecules in an afternoon, no petri dishes required.
Scientists then test the most likely prospects. AI could shorten the time between drug discovery and the pre-investigation stage from roughly 4.5 to 2.5 years. AI could reduce research expenses to one-third of what they might be otherwise.
With breakthroughs like these, we are poised to discover new antimicrobials. Yet the economics mean there’s little incentive to develop them.
Clinicians must use antibiotics judiciously to preserve their effectiveness. This has contributed to challenging economics for companies to recoup the investments made to bring a new antibiotic to market.
Government efforts have a key role to play. The bipartisan PASTEUR Act would create a subscription-like model to ensure that if a company develops a new antimicrobial, it will receive a sufficient return on investment.
My colleagues and I are confident we can outpace antimicrobial resistance scientifically. But we can’t do so on our own. We need a multi-pronged effort that includes a reinvigorated marketplace. The fate of modern medicine depends on it.
Dr. Akhila Kosaraju is CEO and president of Phare Bio.
