HHS has announced funding through the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) for the “Transforming Antibiotic R&D with Generative AI to stop Emerging Threats (TARGET) project, which will use AI to speed the discovery and development of new classes of antibiotics.”
Bacterial infections are a “leading cause of death worldwide, and there is an urgent need to develop new antibiotics as the prevalence of antibiotic-resistant bacteria grows. Conventional efforts to identify and develop new antibiotics require extensive manual screening and testing of molecular compounds, with the majority failing to successfully show antibiotic activity.” TARGET aims to use “deep learning to identify biomolecules with antibiotic and pharmaceutical potential and using generative AI to broaden the pool of candidate molecules.”
The research team will specifically focus on using “generative AI to expand the number of antibiotic candidates,” using “deep learning to develop new screens to test a candidate’s suitability as a pharmaceutical,” and validating discoveries.
This project comes “one year since the ARPA-H announcement of the Defeating Antibiotic Resistance through Transformative Solutions (DARTS) project, which aims to develop a set of diagnostic and experimental platforms that can reveal insights into how antibiotic resistance starts.”
