Artificial Intelligence (AI) has created two new, potentially powerful antibiotics that can fight gonorrhea and Mrsa, two germ -resistant drugs.

The drugs, designed by a person from the Ai, showed impressive results in laboratory and animal tests, killing “hypermalobes”.

Although these two associations still need several years of clinical trials and improvement before they arrive at the market, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) behind this discovery are optimistic. They argue that the use of artificial intelligence could lead to a “second golden age” in antibiotic development.

Antibiotics kill bacteria, but the infections that resist treatment now cause more than one million deaths a year.

Excessive use of antibiotics has helped bacteria evolve to bypass the effects of drugs, and for decades there has been a shortage of new antibiotics.

In the past, researchers have used artificial intelligence to “scan” thousands of well -known chemicals in an attempt to identify those that could evolve into new antibiotics.

Now, the MIT team has taken a step further, using artificial intelligence to design antibiotics from the outset for the sexually transmitted gonorrhea infection and the potentially deadly MRSA (staphylococcus resistant to methicillin).

Their study, published in the Cell Review, examined 36 million associations, including those that either do not exist or have not yet been discovered.

Scientists have trained artificial intelligence (AI) by giving it the chemical structure of known substances and information on whether these substances were effective in slowing the development of various bacteria.

In this way, the AI system has learned to recognize which chemical characteristics make an effective antibiotic compound.

To create the new antibiotics, the researchers used two different approaches with artificial intelligence (AI):

From an existing piece: The first approach began with a database of millions of small chemical pieces (size of 8 to 19 people). Artificial intelligence found a very promising “fragment” and built on it to create a whole molecule.

With complete freedom: The second approach gave artificial intelligence the opportunity to design the molecule from scratch, without any predetermined restriction.

The design process ruled out anything that looked too much with existing antibiotics. He also made sure to ensure that medicines were created and not, for example, soaps, and to reject anything that is estimated to be toxic to humans.

Scientists have used artificial intelligence to create antibiotics against gonorrhea and MRSA, a type of bacterium that lives on the skin without causing damage but can cause severe infection if it enters the body.

After being made, the most promising designs were tested in bacteria in the laboratory and in contaminated mice, leading to the development of two new possible drugs.

“We are excited because we show that genetic artificial intelligence can be used to design completely new antibiotics,” Professor James Collins of MIT told BBC.

“Artificial intelligence can enable us to create molecules quickly and at low cost, thereby expanding our arsenal and really giving us an advantage in the battle of intelligence we give against the genes of transactions.”

However, new drugs are not yet ready for clinical trials and will need further optimization – it is estimated that one to two to two years of work are needed – before the long testing process can begin.