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Canadian researchers use AI to find a possible treatment for bacteria superbug

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Researchers have discovered a promising treatment for an antibiotic-resistant superbug — with the help of artificial intelligence.

Acinetobacter baumannii is a hospital-acquired pathogen that’s commonly found on surfaces in clinical settings. It can cause diseases such as pneumonia, meningitis and sepsis.

According to the World Health Organization, A. baumannii is a critical threat to patients whose care requires devices such as ventilators, due in large part to its resistance against most antibiotics.

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“It’s remarkably challenging [to tackle],” said Jonathan Stokes, an assistant professor at McMaster University, in Hamilton, Ont., who led the research.

“When we go to search for new antibiotics, it necessitates that we start looking for chemicals, antibiotics that have brand new structures and brand new functions. You know, we have to develop a fundamentally new treatment,” he told The Current‘s Matt Galloway.

Usually, this involves testing hundreds of thousands of chemicals to see which ones work best against the disease. But Stokes says “that’s remarkably laborious and time-consuming and expensive.”

That’s why Stokes and the rest of the team, which included scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, turned to AI for assistance.

“Ideally, by leveraging these artificial intelligence algorithms, they can look at these chemicals much more rapidly,” he said. “And by looking at a broad array of chemicals very rapidly, they can help us prioritize which experiments to run in the laboratory.”

Stokes and his team published their findings in the journal Nature Chemical Biology on Thursday.

Training the model

Before the AI can find a chemical that could kill A. baumannii, Stokes and his team trained it by feeding it data on bacteria-killing chemicals and chemical structures “associated with the antibacterial activity that we want,” he said.

“We physically tested in the laboratory about 7,500 chemicals, looking at which ones inhibited the growth of Acinetobacter and which ones did not,” he said.

A 3D illustration shows the morphology of Acinetobacter baumannii, an antibiotic-resistant superbug that, thanks in part to McMaster University scientists and AI, might finally be treatable. (Kateryna Kon/Shutterstock)

Once the AI model was trained, the team could then show it new chemicals it had never seen before. It could then predict which of those chemicals it thought were antibacterial and which ones it thought weren’t.

Eventually, the AI discovered a new antibacterial compound they named abaucin. Further laboratory experiments found that it can treat A. baumannii-infected wounds in mice.

The next step, Stokes said, is to perfect the drug in the laboratory and then perform clinical trials.

This work highlights a promising lead in the fight against A. baumannii — and the role of AI technology in that cause.

“When we completed this project … I feel like we’re entering an era where AI approaches can meaningfully influence how we discover clinical medicine from the earliest stages of discovery,” Stokes said.

Large-scale experiments

For Stokes, AI promises to dramatically speed up scientific and medicinal research.

“Humans might not have to spend so much time and effort performing these large-scale experiments,” he said.

 

How AI could change the future of our health care

Often called the future of health care, artificial intelligence is already finding a place in Canadian hospitals. But AI is far from perfect and some worry about the costs that could come with it.

That promise resonates with other scientists, like Rahul Krishnan, an assistant professor in computational medicine at the University of Toronto.

“If it helps us get to discoveries even 10 per cent faster, that’s a huge win for society as a whole, because we can start making and discovering these drugs at a much faster scale,” he told Galloway.

My goal is to discover new antibiotics to save people’s lives. So if there are … powerful AI technological developments that help me achieve that goal, I am going to embrace them.-Jonathan Stokes

Krishnan, who studies the intersection of AI technology and health care, says the key idea for AI in medicine is to help clinicians make faster, safer decisions.

An AI could look at a patient’s medical records and use them “in conjunction with a predictive model to assist in clinical decision-making,” he said. For example, an AI could quickly predict whether a patient was likely to develop diabetes and then “have a clinician prescribe early interventions,” preventing more serious outcomes later on.

“From a public health standpoint, having the ability to have good predictive models deployed at scale might actually help individuals make better downstream decisions about their health,” he added.

Is AI data accurate, or ethical?

That’s not to say the introduction of AI wouldn’t have its challenges, though.

The growing popularity of AI in multiple fields has led to some warning it could lead to privacy and copyright violations and misinformation campaigns.

Executives, researchers and AI pioneers have warned that its unregulated use of AI could pose serious risks or even threats to humanity itself.

Krishnan says AI could be susceptible to biases that exist in the medical sphere, depending on the data used to train it.

“We know from a lot of studies that have been done over the decades that the health care system that we have in North America is incredibly, in some ways, unfair,” he said.

“Those inequities are often translated into the data that are then fed into these algorithms. And if not corrected for at the point of training, these biases get encoded into the algorithm and every subsequent output that they put out.”

There’s also a risk of the AI making things up, even if it’s trained on reliable data.

“It, in some sense, can often hallucinate, and this is one of the failure modes of large language models … and obviously, that is a huge concern in the context of health care,” Krishnan said.

A woman in a white lab coat and black gloves inspects a small container.
Denise Catacutan, graduate student in the Department of Biochemistry & Biomedical Science and co-author of the paper. (Matt Clarke/McMaster University)

Stokes believes AI technology is advanced enough that it can be implemented now. But he says there’s still a lack of data “across many disease areas” to train these models.

“These AI models are … data hungry. They need to see a lot of examples in order to make robust predictions,” he said.

“So I think the acquisition of data with which we can train these models needs to be at the forefront of all of our thought.”

Embracing AI in medicine

Krishnan sees a future where AI helps a clinician “automate away a lot of the simplistic cases,” freeing them up for more complex work.

“They can spend their cognitive effort and the cognitive cycles on the much more complex cases that demand their attention,” he said.

It’s this augmentation that leads to Stokes to believe that AI have a place in the laboratory and hospitals.

“My goal currently is to discover new antibiotics to save people’s lives,” he said.

“So if there are, you know, more robust, more powerful AI technological developments that help me achieve that goal, I am going to embrace them.”


Produced by Kate Cornick, Willow Smith and Magan Carty.

 

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Measles case reported locally turns out to be negative: health unit

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NEWS RELEASE
SIMCOE MUSKOKA DISTRICT HEALTH UNIT
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On March 26, the Simcoe Muskoka District Health Unit (SMDHU) was notified by Public Health Ontario’s (PHO) laboratory that due to laboratory error, the case of measles that had been lab-confirmed positive on March 12, based on symptoms and a positive urine measles laboratory result by PHO’s laboratory, is in fact negative for the measles virus.

“With this new information of the negative lab result, we believe that that individual was not infected with measles and that there has not been any public exposure to measles resulting from this individual’s illness,” said Dr. Charles Gardner, medical officer of health. “We recognize that notifying the public of what we believed to be a positive measles case in our area created worry, anxiety and disruption for some, and we regret this.

“We do know that, despite best efforts, on rare occasions laboratory errors can occur. We are working closely with the PHO’s laboratory to do all that we can to ensure that such an incident does not occur again.”

Measles is a highly contagious viral infection that spreads very easily through airborne transmission. The measles virus can live in the air or on surfaces for up to two hours.

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Symptoms of measles begin seven to 21 days after exposure and include fever, runny nose, cough, drowsiness, and red eyes. Small white spots appear on the inside of the mouth and throat but are not always present. Three to seven days after symptoms begin, a red, blotchy rash appears on the face and then progresses down the body.

The risk of transmission to those vaccinated with two doses is low, and when it does occur tends to show a reduction in the severity of these symptoms.

“Although we are relieved for the individual involved, and for all Simcoe-Muskoka residents, that this case has now been confirmed as negative, we know that measles is still active in Ontario at this time and the potential remains for new cases to arise, especially given the increase in Ontarians travelling to areas in the world that have higher numbers of measles cases,” said Dr. Gardner. “This is why we continue to advise individuals to keep up to date with their routine immunizations, including measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccination.”

The risk of measles is low for people who have been fully immunized with two doses of measles vaccine or those born before 1970; however, many children have been delayed in receiving their routine childhood immunizations and people who have not had two doses of measles vaccine are at higher risk of contracting the disease.

People who do get sick usually recover without treatment, but measles can be more severe for infants, pregnant women, and those with compromised immune systems. Possible complications include middle-ear infections, pneumonia, diarrhea, or encephalitis (swelling of the brain) and occasionally death in the very young. Even individuals who are up to date with the measles vaccine should watch for symptoms of measles for 21 days after exposure.

For more information about measles, please visit smdhu.org or call Health Connection at 705-721-7520 or 1-877-721-7520, Monday to Friday between 8:30 a.m. and 4:30 p.m. to speak with a public health professional.

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Kate Middleton Not Alone. Cancer On Rise For People Under 50, Say Experts

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Kate Middleton revealed on Friday that her cancer was discovered after she received abdominal surgery

London:

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When Catherine, Princess of Wales, revealed she was being treated for cancer last week, part of the shock was that an otherwise healthy 42-year-old has a disease that mostly plagues older people.

However, researchers have been increasingly sounding the alarm that more and more people under 50 are getting cancer — and no one knows why.

Across the world, the rate of under-50s diagnosed with 29 common cancers surged by nearly 80 percent between 1990 and 2019, a large study in BMJ Oncology found last year.

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The researchers predicted the number of new cancer cases among younger adults will rise another 30 percent by the end of this decade, with wealthy countries particularly affected.

The increase in cases — and soaring global population — means that the number of deaths among under 50s from cancer has risen by nearly 28 percent over the last 30 years.

This occurred even as the odds of people of all ages surviving cancer have roughly doubled over the last half century.

Shivan Sivakumar, a cancer researcher at the UK’s University of Birmingham, called it an “epidemic” of young adult cancer.

Since Kate Middleton revealed on Friday that her cancer was discovered after she received abdominal surgery earlier this year, Sivakumar and other doctors have spoken out about the uptick in younger cancer patients they have been seeing at their clinics.

While breast cancer remains the most common for people under 50, the researchers expressed particular concern about the rise of gastrointestinal cancers — such as of the colon, pancreas, liver and oesophagus — in younger adults.

Colon cancer is now the leading cause of cancer deaths in men under 50 in the United States, according to the American Cancer Society. For women, it is number two — behind only breast cancer.

One high profile case of colorectal cancer was “Black Panther” actor Chadwick Boseman, who died at the age of 43 in 2020.

Why is this happening?

“We just don’t have the evidence yet” to say exactly what is causing this rise, Sivakumar told AFP, adding it was likely a combination of factors.

Helen Coleman, a cancer epidemiology professor at Queen’s University Belfast who has studied early onset cancer in Northern Ireland, told AFP there were two potential explanations.

One is that people in their 40s were exposed to factors known to cause cancer — such tobacco smoke, alcohol or being obese — at an earlier age than previous generations.

She pointed out that the “obesity epidemic” did not start until the 1980s.

Sivakumar felt that at least part of the puzzle could be explained by obesity.

However, there is “another wave” of under-50 patients who are neither obese nor genetically predisposed still getting cancer, he emphasised, adding that this could not be put down to “statistical chance”.

The other theory, Coleman said, is that “something different” has been going on with her generation.

Fingers have been pointed out a range of possible culprits — including chemicals, new drugs and microplastics — but none have been proven.

Some have suggested that so-called ultra-processed foods could be to blame. “But there’s very little data to back any of that up,” Coleman said.

Another theory is that the food we eat could be changing our gut microbiome.

While there is nothing conclusive yet, Coleman said her own research suggested that cancer causes changes to the microbiome, not the other way around.

Anti-vaxx conspiracy theorists have even tried to blame Covid-19 vaccines.

This is easily disproven, because the rise in young adult cancer has taken place over decades, but the vaccines have only been around for a few years.

What can be done?

To address the rise in younger colorectal cancer, in 2021 the US lowered the recommended age for screening to 45. Other countries have yet to follow suit.

But the researchers hoped that Catherine’s experience would remind people at home that they should consult their doctor if they sense anything is wrong.

“People know their bodies really well,” Sivakumar said.

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“If you really feel that something isn’t right, don’t delay — just get yourself checked out.”

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Almost 3,000 students suspended in Waterloo Region over immunization issues

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Close to 3,000 children attending elementary school across Waterloo Region were suspended from school on Wednesday morning for not having up-to-date immunization records.

The region says Waterloo Public Health suspended 2,969 students under the Immunization of School Pupils Act (ISPA).

For several months, the region has been campaigning for people to get their children’s vaccinations up to date, including sending letters home to parents on a couple of occasions, warning that students’ records needed to be up to date or they would be suspended.

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It announced in January that 32,000 students did not have up-to-date records: 22,000 elementary students and 10,000 high school students.


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“We have made remarkable progress from the original 27,567 immunization notices we sent to parents in November and December 2023,” Dr. Hsiu-Li Wang, medical officer of health, stated.

“Since that time, we have resolved more than 24,500 outdated vaccination records, providing students with valuable protection against these serious and preventable diseases.”

The high school students still have a few weeks to get their records up to date or else face suspension.

The ISPA requires students to have proof-of-vaccination records for diphtheria, polio, tetanus, pertussis, measles, mumps, rubella, varicella (chickenpox) and meningitis, which must be on file with public health.

Public health says caregivers whose children are suspended will need to book an appointment at regionofwaterloo.ca/vaccines for clinics, which will be held in Cambridge and Waterloo on weekdays.

“Given the high number of suspensions, it may take several days before you can be seen at an appointment and return your child to school,” a release from the region warns.

“Record submission and questions must be done in person to ensure immediate resolution.”

The last time suspensions over immunizations were issued was in 2019, when 1,032 students were suspended.

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