Using AI to outsmart drug-resistant bacteria

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:04]It's recognized internationally that there is a silent pandemic [music] of antimicrobial resistance, and we need some new way of thinking.

[00:00:12]>> [music] >> If you want an effective therapy, you have to continuously find new variations of antibiotics.

[00:00:20]This will always be the problem. It's inherent to biological systems.

[00:00:25]If patients don't respond to the antibiotics, they can have life-threatening infections.

[00:00:31]We generate new antimicrobial agents, but pretty much as soon as we generate [music] those new antimicrobial agents, resistance arises.

[00:00:39]You're constantly chasing to try and solve a problem.

[00:00:43]>> [music] >> This is where we're finding that AI tools are very powerful.

[00:00:50]>> [music] >> When I started many years ago, it could take years to elucidate experimental structure.

[00:01:01]Yeah, it's 6 minutes with tools I got for four.

[00:01:06]>> [music] >> DeepMind tools have been absolutely transformative.

[00:01:10]We can accomplish things that we couldn't independently before.

[00:01:14]We've been using AI programs like Gemini as I understand, and it does come up with things that are a bit out of the box and change our perspective. It often generated ideas that I didn't even necessarily ask it for. [music] It just connected certain dots which were there in previous questions, which I find remarkable.

[00:01:34]We're making such rapid progress into understanding that new biology [music] and understanding new biological principles.

[00:01:41]What I hadn't anticipated is the power of networks to pick up on patterns that are not always intuitively apparent to the human eye.

[00:01:51]It makes the matches and correlations that allows us to find new ways of treating threatening infections.