• UGI USER
  • Feb 09, 2024
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BREAKTHROUGH IN ANTIBIOTIC DISCOVERY

Focus: Discovering a New Class of Antibiotics:

  • Scientists report a significant breakthrough in antibiotic discovery using deep-learning approaches.
  • This discovery marks the end of a decades-long wait since the last known structural class of antibiotics reported in 2000.
.Source: JPABS

Historical Connection:

  • In 1944, the year of the first artificial neural network proposal, scientists discovered streptomycin, the world’s first aminoglycoside antibiotic.
  • The recent breakthrough deepens the connection between deep-learning and antibiotics, reported in a December 2023 paper in Nature.

Enhancing Drug Development:

  • Unlike previous approaches, scientists identified chemical motifs or substructures used by their deep-learning model to assess a compound’s potential as an antibiotic.
  • Two compounds from this novel class showed efficacy against methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) infections, responsible for numerous human deaths in 2019.

Note: The breakthrough involves making deep-learning models “explainable,” providing transparency in the identification of potential antibiotics and their substructures, expediting drug development

Key Terms

Artificial Neural Network (ANN):

An algorithm inspired by the human brain’s neural networks, designed to process and analyze complex data to recognize patterns and make predictions.

Antibiotics:

Medications that inhibit or kill bacteria, used to treat bacterial infections in humans and animals, preventing the spread and growth of harmful bacteria.

Deep Learning:

A subset of machine learning, involving neural networks with multiple layers to analyze and process data, enabling complex pattern recognition and decision-making tasks.