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.
“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.”
An interdisciplinary team of remarkable scientists (and great friends) put together a study leveraging AI to find new antibacterial molecules against Acinetobacter baumannii. I think we are well into an era of AI-augmented drug discovery…WOOO!!!<a href=”https://t.co/Igp8bRRAv0″>https://t.co/Igp8bRRAv0</a>
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.”
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.
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.
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.
HALIFAX – The Nova Scotia government says it could be months before it reveals how many people are on the wait-list for a family doctor.
The head of the province’s health authority told reporters Wednesday that the government won’t release updated data until the 160,000 people who were on the wait-list in June are contacted to verify whether they still need primary care.
Karen Oldfield said Nova Scotia Health is working on validating the primary care wait-list data before posting new numbers, and that work may take a matter of months. The most recent public wait-list figures are from June 1, when 160,234 people, or about 16 per cent of the population, were on it.
“It’s going to take time to make 160,000 calls,” Oldfield said. “We are not talking weeks, we are talking months.”
The interim CEO and president of Nova Scotia Health said people on the list are being asked where they live, whether they still need a family doctor, and to give an update on their health.
A spokesperson with the province’s Health Department says the government and its health authority are “working hard” to turn the wait-list registry into a useful tool, adding that the data will be shared once it is validated.
Nova Scotia’s NDP are calling on Premier Tim Houston to immediately release statistics on how many people are looking for a family doctor. On Tuesday, the NDP introduced a bill that would require the health minister to make the number public every month.
“It is unacceptable for the list to be more than three months out of date,” NDP Leader Claudia Chender said Tuesday.
Chender said releasing this data regularly is vital so Nova Scotians can track the government’s progress on its main 2021 campaign promise: fixing health care.
The number of people in need of a family doctor has more than doubled between the 2021 summer election campaign and June 2024. Since September 2021 about 300 doctors have been added to the provincial health system, the Health Department said.
“We’ll know if Tim Houston is keeping his 2021 election promise to fix health care when Nova Scotians are attached to primary care,” Chender said.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 11, 2024.
ST. JOHN’S, N.L. – Newfoundland and Labrador‘s chief medical officer is monitoring the rise of whooping cough infections across the province as cases of the highly contagious disease continue to grow across Canada.
Dr. Janice Fitzgerald says that so far this year, the province has recorded 230 confirmed cases of the vaccine-preventable respiratory tract infection, also known as pertussis.
Late last month, Quebec reported more than 11,000 cases during the same time period, while Ontario counted 470 cases, well above the five-year average of 98. In Quebec, the majority of patients are between the ages of 10 and 14.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick has declared a whooping cough outbreak across the province. A total of 141 cases were reported by last month, exceeding the five-year average of 34.
The disease can lead to severe complications among vulnerable populations including infants, who are at the highest risk of suffering from complications like pneumonia and seizures. Symptoms may start with a runny nose, mild fever and cough, then progress to severe coughing accompanied by a distinctive “whooping” sound during inhalation.
“The public, especially pregnant people and those in close contact with infants, are encouraged to be aware of symptoms related to pertussis and to ensure vaccinations are up to date,” Newfoundland and Labrador’s Health Department said in a statement.
Whooping cough can be treated with antibiotics, but vaccination is the most effective way to control the spread of the disease. As a result, the province has expanded immunization efforts this school year. While booster doses are already offered in Grade 9, the vaccine is now being offered to Grade 8 students as well.
Public health officials say whooping cough is a cyclical disease that increases every two to five or six years.
Meanwhile, New Brunswick’s acting chief medical officer of health expects the current case count to get worse before tapering off.
A rise in whooping cough cases has also been reported in the United States and elsewhere. The Pan American Health Organization issued an alert in July encouraging countries to ramp up their surveillance and vaccination coverage.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 10, 2024.
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