AI-designed antibiotics: more good news to report

This is getting to be a habit. About a year ago we showcased a story about the redoubtable Professor de la Fuente and his team at the University of Pennsylvania who were starting to use AI for the development of new antibiotics. (LSS 6 6 2024). Since when our optimism has been justified seven fold over and seven, to coin a phrase. For today we are genuinely excited to bring you this story from James Gallagher of the BBC which takes things up to the next stage. [1]

Because another redoubtable Professor, one James Collins and his team at MIT have now used AI not only to identify potential new antibiotics, but also to synthesise them and prepare them for testing. What’s more, they’re going to try them out on MRSA and gonorrhoea, two recalcitrant old lags which have long frustrated researchers, as our long term readers will recall

The story ticks quite a few more LSS boxes with institutions like Imperial College and the Fleming Fund getting quotes. At last, things seem to be coming together. When we started our antibiotics obsession, ten long years ago, we foresaw the current civilisation collapsing under unstoppable plagues, just like the Roman one before us did. But if it does, it may not be for lack of new antibiotics: we feel we can say that much now. Plenty of lethal threats still confront us, from Global warming to the threat of nuclear war. And the recent collapse of the talks designed to limit plastic pollution is a shameful reminder of the cognitive limits of our species..[2] But: just occasionally, something can be done about something. Maybe that’s hope , for all we know.

[1]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cgr94xxye2lo

[2]https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgpddpldleo

#artificial intelligence #antibiotics #antibiotic resistance #MRSA #MIT

Paracetamol from Plastic Bottles-this could be the start of something big

Remember how your mum always made you swallow water to wash down your headache pills? What if those pills had been made from the remains of a long discarded plastic bottle that some other child had been forced to undergo? According to the resourceful Nicola Davis of the Guardian, it’s about to happen.[1] And the implications are enormous.

A team lead by Professor Stephen Wallace of the University of Edinburgh has actually gone and turned old plastic bottles into medicine. Combining the very best in organic chemistry and genetic engineering, they have modified a strain of E. coli to make good old paracetamol, that standby of every household drugs stash the world over. [2] The details of how they do it may be read in the links supplied. But our interest today is somewhat different.

At last someone has found a use for all those mountains of ghastly plastic waste which so disfigure this once beautiful planet. It can be made into something which millions, no billions, of people can deploy every day: and to some beneficent purpose. And if paracetamol, why not other things? Meanwhile. fans of economics will note the creation of a demand., Soon people may be fighting each other in the streets to get the best plastic bottles to sell to wholesalers. Nations will go to war to gain access to those vast disgusting rafts of waste which currently drift around the oceans. There’s one sure way to modify the behaviour of the ignorant mass of humankind- Turn virtue into economics and let them make some money from it. The Professor and his team may have done just that.

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jun/23/scientists-use-e-coli-bacteria-to-turn-plastic-waste-into-paracetamol-painkiller

[2]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-025-01845-5

#genetic engineering #organic chemistry #plastic #pollution #medicine