Antibiotic resistance has become a public health problem in recent years that has led the highest health authorities to raise the alarm for combating it.

The World Health Organization (WHO) explains that antimicrobial resistance is a natural process, but that the phenomenon is accelerating due to the misuse of drugs.

“Day after day, new resistance mechanisms are emerging and spreading across the planet, threatening our ability to treat common infectious diseases,” the report said.

One of the dangers associated with this resistance is the increase in clinical costs, as well as length of hospital stay and increased mortality.

Antibiotic resistance would cause the next pandemic; in Ecuador there is an overuse of these resources

So a group of researchers used an artificial intelligence tool to discover a powerful antibiotic that would be able to eliminate one of the world’s deadliest bacteria.

In a publication in the scientific journal Nature Chemical Biology, this discovery was announced, which they called abaucin, which must pass a testing phase before it can be used as a treatment.

Jonathan Stokes, a researcher at McMaster University in Canada, noted that the bacteria they examined are resistant to almost all antibiotics.

The specialist explained that they had managed to explore regions of chemical space and increased the chances of discovering new antibacterial molecules. So they learned the algorithm to identify chemical structures that prevent the growth of Escherichia coli bacteria. Then artificial intelligence suggested a molecule to kill it and they called it halicin.

They replicated the model to test other compounds with different structures, yielding hundreds of results. This brought out nine antibiotics, according to El Confidencial, and one of them was one used to fight diabetes that was also effective against bacteria with greater resistance to these drugs.

One of the advantages of this method is that a compound has been found that does not affect other bacterial species, reducing the risk of resistance. Now they need to optimize its properties to make it suitable for use in patients.

It would have to wait until 2030 before they can be prescribed to the public.