AI designed brand-new antibiotics that kill drug-resistant gonorrhea and MRSA
MIT researchers used generative AI to design millions of molecules that had never existed, then made and tested the most promising. Two of them killed drug-resistant gonorrhea and MRSA in the lab and in mice.
Why this is new because of AI
These are not old drugs found in a library. The AI invented the molecules from scratch, and they attack bacteria in ways existing antibiotics do not. Chemists had no practical way to search that many possible molecules by hand.