AI and Antibiotics?
"The World Health Organization estimates that 10 million annual deaths could occur as a direct result of drug-resistant infections globally by 2050, but developing new antibiotics requires a substantial amount of time and money."
New research utilizing AI is a great step in the right direction to reducing deaths due to antibiotic resistance. New antibiotics are absolutely a part of the solution, and will help save lives. But that can't be our only focus. Developing new antibiotics is a topic that comes up often in the conversation around antibiotic resistance. If a bacteria develops resistance to one antibiotic, then why don't we just develop new antibiotics? The answer is simple, while it is possible to develop new antibiotics it is time consuming and expensive to do so.
Additionally, even as new antibiotics are developed we release them into the same broken system that rendered previous antibiotics useless. At some point resistance to the new antibiotic will emerge and we are in the same boat that we started in. This is the vicious cycle that we are trying to stop. It is up to us to fix the system and use antibiotics responsibly.