Artificial intelligence has opened a chest that had been closed almost 4,000 million years. Inside there was no gold, but something much more valuable: an arsenal of molecules capable of fighting superbacteria. This is the result of the team led by the Spanish biotechnologist César de la Fuente at the University of Pennsylvania, which has studied the genome of the arches, one of the oldest lineages of life on earth, to discover a family of antibiotics that has called archesasins.
An invisible and increasingly strong enemy. WHO considers the resistance of antimicrobials (RAM) as One of the greatest threats to humanity. Only in 2019 almost 5 million deaths were associated worldwide Due to bacteria that cannot be eliminated with antibiotics because they have developed defenses against them. A threat that is increasing, and that forces us to look for new antibiotics to fight against them.
The problem It is especially serious in vulnerable areas such as conflict environments or that have a very fragile health system where the misuse of antibiotics causes these ‘superbacteria’ to appear. And in Spain, something as simple as Take antibiotics to treat a virus or not finish the complete pattern prescribed can also contribute to this serious problem.
Archaeas: Extreme rescue survivors. The Archaeas They are unicellular microorganisms that are really ‘strong’. They are evolutionary premiums of bacteria, but form their own life domain, together with bacteria and eukaryotes (the group where we find the cells we have in our body or in plants).
They were born in the primitive earth, a hostile environment that forced them to adapt to live in conditions that would kill most living beings, with temperatures greater than 80 degrees, extreme acidity or the great pressures that were in the oceanic funds.
Its resistance is our great advantage. Precisely seeing that these bacteria could survive the most inhospitable places, he gave rise to the research team to search among their defense mechanisms. And it was the key. César de la Fuente himself He explains it Thus to El País:
Since the discovery of penicillin, the search for new antibiotics has been practically focused exclusively on bacteria and fungi. With our work, this paradigm changes because we find antibiotics in a domain of virtually unexplored life.
An AI to look for molecular treasures. To be able to search among the more than 20,000 species of different arches, the team had to develop an AI with ‘Apexoracle‘To be able to find what they were looking for. And he did. The AI identified 90 candidate compounds that gathered the criteria they were looking for and of these, 93% were those that showed antimicrobial properties. In this way, a lot of time were saved.
Archaeasins: The new artillery against superbacteria. Among the discovered compounds, one of them was the archeanine-73. This has demonstrated in models In vivo That has a power comparable to polymixin B, an antibiotic that is on the last step of antibiotic therapy when literally used as a last resort in a superbacteria. And here the future opens up to a new batch of antibiotics that allow us to continue surviving ultra -vertrassing bacteria.
It is not the only way, but it is a revolutionary. This strategy of combining computational power with biology is a field in full boiling. We are seeing it with ia that are used to detect pancreatic cancer early, predict breast cancer either be a general help for any radiologist. And in the field of research, they also continue to support even to know why a superbacterial did not respond to a treatment.
Images | Danilo.Alvesd Myriam Zilles
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