Human history was forever changed with the discovery of antibiotics in 1928. Infectious diseases such as pneumonia, tuberculosis, and sepsis were widespread and lethal until penicillin made them treatable. Surgical procedures that once came with a high risk of infection became safer and more routine. Antibiotics marked a triumphant moment in science that transformed medical practice and saved countless lives.
But antibiotics have an inherent caveat: When overused, bacteria can evolve resistance to these drugs. The World Health Organization estimated that these superbugs caused 1.27 million deaths around the world in 2019 and will likely become an increasing threat to global public health in the coming years.
New discoveries are helping scientists face this challenge in innovative ways. Studies have found that nearly a quarter of drugs that aren’t normally prescribed as antibiotics, such as medications used to treat cancer, diabetes, and depression, can kill bacteria at doses typically prescribed for people.
Understanding the mechanisms underlying how certain drugs are toxic to bacteria may have far-reaching implications for medicine. If nonantibiotic drugs target bacteria in different ways from standard antibiotics, they could serve as leads in developing new antibiotics. But if nonantibiotics kill bacteria in similar ways to known antibiotics, their prolonged use, such as in the treatment of chronic disease, might inadvertently promote antibiotic resistance.
In our recently published research, my colleagues and I developed a new machine learning method that not only identified how nonantibiotics kill bacteria but can also help find new bacterial targets for antibiotics.
Numerous scientists and physicians around the world are tackling the problem of drug resistance, including me and my colleagues in the Mitchell Lab. We use the genetics of bacteria to study which mutations make bacteria more resistant or more sensitive to drugs.
Our work shows that combining genetic screening with machine learning can help uncover the chemical needle in the haystack that can kill bacteria in ways researchers haven’t used before. There are different ways to kill bacteria we haven’t exploited yet, and there are still roads we can take to fight the threat of bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance.
