21–30 of 100 posts
The nature article is paywalled so it's impossible to see what they actually did, and the abstract is not very clear either. What benefit did they get from whole-genome sequencing, for example? Additionally, it can't be called an antibiotic until it goes through the necessary human clinical trials, where all kinds of problems can crop up - they don't seem to provide any evidence that their AI-enabled scan for human c…
I've been under the impression that we don't have new antibiotics because it is not economically viable. When you invent new weight loss drug you can sell millions of pills to anyone. If you invent new antibiotic it is immediately classified as "reserve antibiotic" and the sale is restricted.
The nature article is paywalled so it's impossible to see what they actually did, and the abstract is not very clear either. What benefit did they get from whole-genome sequencing, for example? Additionally, it can't be called an antibiotic until it goes through the necessary human clinical trials, where all kinds of problems can crop up - they don't seem to provide any evidence that their AI-enabled scan for human c…
An antibiotic is an antibiotic whether or not it would kill a patient too.
They did a virtual screen of a large compound library.
QSAR / QSPR / Virtual Screening has been around since the late 1950s.
The secret sauce here was the large experimental dataset - on the order of 10^5 compounds - they generated to train the model.
Maybe the explainability part is kind of novel for a neural network based approach; but not clear that you couldn’t identify substructure classes better with a pure bioinformatic approach.
Tigecycline https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1426172/ is a new class of antibiotics discovered around 2005 that also works against resistant bacteria such as MRSA and VRE. So while it is great they are coming up with new antibiotics, it is by no means the first in 60 years.
I've been under the impression that we don't have new antibiotics because it is not economically viable. When you invent new weight loss drug you can sell millions of pills to anyone. If you invent new antibiotic it is immediately classified as "reserve antibiotic" and the sale is restricted.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>it is immediately classified as "reserve antibiotic" and the sale is restricted. Is that so medical professionals can break it out as a means of last resort to save a patient and ensure the course is finished? If so that mightn't be a bad idea before we destroy the potential of new antibiotics too by having the general public misuse them render them useless over time.
I think the above commenter is just pointing out how the fundamental conflict between these two things results in significantly lessened incentive for pharmaceutical companies to put money into researching new antibiotics
I've been under the impression that we don't have new antibiotics because it is not economically viable. When you invent new weight loss drug you can sell millions of pills to anyone. If you invent new antibiotic it is immediately classified as "reserve antibiotic" and the sale is restricted.
It requires a socialized solution: to fund it for future needs rather than for profits.
Anyway, how does holding antibiotics in reserve help anything? Why let the bugs evolve resistance to one antibiotic at a time, rather than hitting them them with multiple antibiotics and thus raising the evolutionary hurdle to resistance? Was this strategy designed by the bad guys in a Jacky Chan movie?