Halicin

Halicin is a powerful antibiotic discovered by researchers at MIT's Jameel Clinic in 2020, using artificial intelligence (AI) technology.

The computer model, which can screen more than a hundred million chemical compounds in a matter of days, is designed to pick out potential antibiotics that kill bacteria using different mechanisms than those of existing drugs.

Regina Barzilay and Jim Collins, who are faculty co-leads for MIT’s Jameel Clinic, are the senior authors of the study, which appeared in Cell. The first author of the paper is Jonathan Stokes, a post-doc at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

In their new study, the researchers also identified several other promising antibiotic candidates, which they plan to test further. They believe the model could also be used to design new drugs, based on what it has learned about chemical structures that enable drugs to kill bacteria.

“The machine learning model can explore, in silico, large chemical spaces that can be prohibitively expensive for traditional experimental approaches,” says Barzilay, the Delta Electronics Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL).

Over the past few decades, very few new antibiotics have been developed, and most of those newly approved antibiotics are slightly different variants of existing drugs. Current methods for screening new antibiotics are often prohibitively costly, require a significant time investment, and are usually limited to a narrow spectrum of chemical diversity.

“We’re facing a growing crisis around antibiotic resistance, and this situation is being generated by both an increasing number of pathogens becoming resistant to existing antibiotics, and an anaemic pipeline in the biotech and pharmaceutical industries for new antibiotics,” Collins says.

The molecule picked out by the model was predicted to have strong antibacterial activity and had a chemical structure different from any existing antibiotics. Using a different machine-learning model, the researchers also showed that this molecule would likely have low toxicity to human cells.

The researchers plan to pursue further studies of the molecule, working with a pharmaceutical company or nonprofit organisation, in hopes of developing it for use in humans. The researchers also plan to use their model to design new antibiotics and to optimise existing molecules. For example, they could train the model to add features that would make a particular antibiotic target only certain bacteria, preventing it from killing beneficial bacteria in a patient’s digestive tract.