The article (and what I can access of the paper it is based on) doesn’t really give any details as to what this class is, how it works etc. All the interesting parts about this aren’t mentioned.
It sounds like they trained a classification model using 39,000 molecules with known reactivity to MRSA. The molecules are vectorized text representations of the structures. Once trained, they can run arbitrary molecules through the model and see which ones are predicted to have antibiotic properties, or at least MRSA reactivity.
They likely fed in molecules from families of structures that seem likely to contain an antibiotic but are too numerous to manually test them all. They get a prediction of which ones are likely to have the properties they want, and then start the slow process of creating and testing the molecules in the lab.
I get what they did (its been something a lot of groups have been wanting to do for years) but I am curious what molecule specifically they found that worked especially well. i.e What does this thing look like? What is the new antibiotic’s mechanism of action? None of those latter details are discussed. Its something we can only guess at.
It sounds like they are moving forward with clinical testing in partnership with a bio company, so I’m sure they withheld the information anticipating a patent. The results of this paper was the validation of the explainable AI model which identified candidate classes of compounds.
Wow I love science. I love that someone owns the exclusive rights to sell new drugs at whatever price they want
This is why we need single payer healthcare. Let them charge whatever they want, but if there is only one buyer, that buyer can also pay whatever they want.
That’s not science, that’s capitalism. Don’t forget that Dr. Jonas Salk refused to patent the polio vaccine, which is estimated to have a total value of over seven billion US dollars. Dr. Salk has always been a hero of mine.
Shit bag lawyers from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis later tried to see if they could patent it for themselves and luckily couldn’t. That’s capitalism for you. Fuck these guys.
capitalism, isn’t the free market so hopeful for the masses?
Well this is uplifting. I for one choose to view the future of ai in a more “Iain M Banks Culture novel” way.
It’s people that ruin things. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
But it’s going to be. Until we do something to stop them, it’s absolutely going to be that way. There’s no serious view of human history that will tell you anything different.
We can’t just sit here and marvel at technology without acknowledging who controls it, who uses it, and what they’re going to use it for. Without people, AI is just a bunch of code sitting there waiting for input.
Think of how many more species we can drive to extinction now!
Signing up for contact division now, I can’t wait
Me too, but I don’t like my odds.
ai is finding antibiotics for diseases ai hasn’t even created yet (I kid, I kid)
🫠
Finally a good use of AI, instead of using it to replace artists.
Yeah but think of all the bacteria it’s putting out of work.
most artists deserve to be replaced
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The one uniquely human product in all of the planet’s history? Yeah, ok.
thats not true.
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It’s not AI itself that we have to worry about, it the same old thing we’ve always had to worry about.
Greed
You’re right, but We’ll get what we deserve when it comes to that.
The one thing the greedy tech bastardizers have never been able to do is shut down, not for lack of trying, the benevolent open source and human knowledge belongs to the world movements. The seven seas are still free and the most motivated thinkers are still the open source ones, matey.
They have nothing that isn’t already being extrapolated and tinkered with on private servers. If they use the soon to come AGI to make the peasant’s lives even more bleak, they might not like the damage in kind that can be done with some militant engineer’s homebrew anti-cap AGI. What could that do? Engineer a plague? Mass delete banking records? Who knows but it’s increasingly likely we’ll find out!
If wealthy “winner” humans continue to insist on making most humans live’s increasingly desperate, solely because they are never getting richer fast enough and without regard to the concept of Mutually assured destruction, then our species will have to experience the inevitable consequences of that choice. They have the capital, so its on them.
We’ll get what we deserve when it comes to that.
What’s even worse, a lot of people are going to get what just a handful deserve
It’s just a movie, relax.
Staphylococcus kills thousands of people every year, this is a good thing.
We have PLENTY of negative places you could go here on Lemmy that really really hate all things futurism and technology, please try to save your dooomerism for those places, we just literally don’t have many positive spaces left and it’s so frustrating to come from the good news of the article only to see silly comments like yours that make it seem like we are all going to die because AI found a way to help us.
Sorry, you seem to have lost the thread. We’re talking about scary things that happen movies, not current daily real-world issues which could really use our focus but we’re to involved in the media.
Focus on the media, join our ignorant dance.
There is a massively conservative movement lurking in the left, which opposes any new advances and wants people to return to subsistence farming and shit. Same kind of people that argue against having kids to gut the population worldwide
Those people aren’t even worth arguing with. They’re not the people that will show up to do any work to accomplish policy objectives. They aren’t serious, their objections will never be listened to, and they don’t actually want to make anything better.
It’s just tradwife-homesteader fantasizing, just with a different economic view and less (but not 0) racism.
Maybe things will work out for the better. Maybe they take over. Worst case scenario I blow my fucking brains out so i don’t have to live though the apocalypse.
I’ll roll those dice.
Same!
Either way, It’s main event time and we’re both fortunate enough to have tickets! I’ll even stay for the apocalypse and see how I do, to a point.
I look at it as the AI we build is humanity’s child. It will outgrow us. And we will age out and die.
On a cosmic scale, an AI can operate in ways humans never could.
Even if you use the augmented humans path, eventually, all the human will be augmented out of existence until only the AI is left.
and, like many peoples parents, imma fucking kill myself.
You can’t unopen Pandora’s Box.
In this case I’m glad. We are close to achieving the technology to let technology self-iterate and propagate.
The direction our species chooses to apply this technology will be a reflection and measure of who we are with commensurate rewards and/or consequences.
Will some voices of sanity let us harness the power of this atom to enlighten the world? Or will we follow tradition and use our newfound power to make big boomie boom rival tribe over there, yet again?
I’m just glad I can mess around with it at home and it’s not all locked up. People resisting Ai don’t seem to realize it’s not only here forever, but it’s quickly going main stream.
I mean, honestly, probably the latter, BUT this time, the atom gets a say too.
You, I like you.
Honestly I’d be surprised if we didn’t do both with it
Quick to the beef depository!
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First Check if it doesn’t make our fingers merge into a stub
Ooo, a new allergy!
My dad was allergic to practically every antibiotic. He only developed the allergy in his senior years. It was a big problem for him. Even if the antibiotic seemed to be working okay, he had to take a lot of Benadryl just in case and keep an epi pen around.
It’s very common as you hit a second puberty and you’re body is suddenly like ‘nah’.
It’s like a warranty is up or something.
Thankfully, my mother doesn’t seem to have this problem. She’s 81, so if she hasn’t developed it yet, I don’t think she’s going to. Really sucked for my dad though.
Can’t wait for anti-antibiotics movements! 😅
Anti-antibiotics… Isn’t that just biotics? Like from Mass Effect? IDK, could be cool 👀
Yeah, just like anti-antifa… 😅
It would be long overdue. The scientific consensus for vast harms from antibiotics has been strong for many years. https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/
Meh, then I guess it’s time to stick with flat earth theory… :/
Bacteriophages are a great secondary option. Similar to how bacteria quickly evolve resistance to antibiotics, bacteriophages can quickly evolve to circumvent phage resistance.
This AI thing would be excellent at hide and seek.
Does this AI use the same process for piecing together things as LLMs do for art and writing? Is this a drug we have known about but not yet applied as an antibiotic or a whole new compound?
It doesn’t sound like it but they don’t have enough detail in the article to say.
It sounds likey they are using a classification model that takes a vectorized text representation of molecules and classifies or scores them by their expected properties/reactivity. They took 39,000 molecules with known reactivity to MRSA to train the model, I assume to classify the structures. Once trained they can feed in arbitrary molecules into the trained model and see which ones are predicted to have antibiotic properties, which they can verify with bench work.
They likely fed in molecules from classes of likely candidate structures, and the model helped focus and direct the wet work.
I’m not up on the latest, but years ago I helped a similar project using FPGAs running statistical models to direct lab work.
I’d be interested to know why FPGAs were selected for this application. I’m not especially familiar with their use cases.
This was years ago before GPU processing really took off, and we wanted the performance, but also, wanted to see if we could develop an affordable discrete lab device that could be placed in labs to aid in computationally directed bench work. So effectively, testing the efficacy of the models and designing ASICs to perform lab tests.
With a CPU or even a GPU, there is a bunch of inefficiencies for every task as they’re designed to be able to do pretty much anything - your H265 media decoder isn’t going to be doing much when you’re keeping a running sum of the number of a certain type of bond in a list of chemicals
With ASICs and a lesser extent FPGAs, you can make it so every single transistor is being used at every moment which makes them wildly efficient for doing a single repetitive task, such as running statistical analysis on a huge dataset. This is because rather than being limited by the multiprocessing ability of the CPU or GPU, you can design the “program” to run with as much multiprocessing ability as is possible based on the program, meaning if you stream one input per clock cycle, after a delay you will get one input per clock cycle out, including your update function so long as it’s simple enough (eg moving average, running sum or even just writing to memory)
This is one specific application of FPGAs (static streaming) but it’s the one that’s relevant here
So it sounds like we’re designing the instruction pipeline for maximum parallelism for our task. I was surprised to learn that the first commercial FPGAs were available as early as the '80s. I can see how this would have been an extremely effective option before CUDA became available.
Don’t know why they chose them, but I do know they’re used in cartridge emulation for older consoles.
Wikipedia says they’re great at simulation and parallel processing, which works great here.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field-programmable_gate_array
llms have progressed beyond cut and paste way more than a year ago. they have shown understanding of what items are and how they behave and interact. I know it’s popular here to call it a parrot or whatever but most people don’t have access to the high level stuff and most seem afraid/snobby/parroting things themselves.
Virtual screening libraries are usually some form of expanded chemical space meaning they contain real and previously unknown compounds. The article says the 12 million compounds screened virtually were commercially available, but I couldn’t see enough of the nature paper to verify. It could be that the virtual screening set was acquired from a private company, but that doesn’t necessarily mean all the compounds are known.
Great. Now don’t overuse it again.
I guess all the people solely cheering for this aren’t aware of the damage we’ve been doing to ourselves with antibiotics:
Resistance may already be a solved problem: https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/#fmt-to-counter-antibiotic-resistance
This is a simplified to the point of absurdity comment. Microbiome is important, but is absolutely not enough to prevent antibiotic resistance.
That is simply wrong. I wonder what gives you the courage to make such boldly false statements?
My medical degree, internship, residency, and years practicing as a doctor.
All that and yet your statement contradicts the plethora of citations that were provided, without providing any support yourself.
If you spent more than 3 seconds reading what you post, you’d realize that fecal transplant only affects the gut microbiome, not body-wide resistance. Fecal transplant, obviously, does nothing to combat pneumonia, skin infections, abscesses, or literally anywhere other than the gut. As the vast majority of fatal or life threatening infections are not isolated to the gut, your argument fails. But I need not argue against citations, as the provided papers don’t even argue your point.
That’s not true. The gut microbiome regulates the entire body, including other body site’s microbiomes. This information is included in the links I shared. Here is a specific page that covers it https://humanmicrobiome.info/systemic/ but there’s more in the rest of the wiki as well.
So nothing relevant to the discussion. Got it.
Bacterial infections can kill people.
Don’t be stupid
A perfect example of the black and white thinking that has caused so much harm.
https://humanmicrobiome.info/antibiotics/#antibiotics-overuse
If the choice between giving someone life saving antibiotics or disrupting their gut microbiom until they eat some yogurt, that’s an easy choice.
False equivalency is what you’re doing, btw
What you just said is harmful misinformation and 100% demonstrates that you didn’t read a damn thing that you’re responding to and acting like you’re an expert on.
It isn’t, and a random website isn’t a source
If you have an article from a medical journal, or a study with a sample size of over 1,000 diverse participants I’ll happily read that.
I could make a website that contradicts everything in the one you linked and host that for free.
Antibiotics save lives. Vaccines save lives. They are good things.
It isn’t, and a random website isn’t a source
So you clearly don’t understand how citations work. You shouldn’t even be engaging in discussions like this until you do.
If you have an article from a medical journal, or a study with a sample size of over 1,000 diverse participants I’ll happily read that.
Once again proving that you didn’t read anything you’re arguing about. You need to reassess your behavior.
Antibiotics save lives. Vaccines save lives. They are good things.
False dichotomy, further demonstrating your cluelessness.
I know I’m not going to convince you, and that’s fine, but people like you get other people killed.
Steve Jobs infamously had a treatable form of cancer, but instead of going to a doctor and doing the scientifically verified treatment he ate fruit that some nut job said would cure him and he died.
The only medical advice anyone should ever give is go to a doctor. That’s it. Period. The end.
