Show Notes: 47 – It’s A Big One

AI For Research In Vaccines Reported On OZFest

Show Notes: AI Am Here To Help

Operation Warp Speed With AI

Using AI, scientists bring Neanderthal antibiotics back from extinction

Antibiotics are not as financially rewarding, and this article states as much.  That’s why we need to accelerate exotic peptide resurrection with AI.  Peptides are messenger RNA.  But guess what, Big Pharma doesn’t have financial incentive to update antibiotic treatment:

Big Pharma and biotech companies haven’t been creating the new antibiotics needed to address the crisis because it takes many years and lots of funding to do the research and development. Most new compounds fail. Even when they succeed, the payoff is small: An antibiotic doesn’t sell as well as a drug that needs to be taken daily. So for many pharma companies, the financial incentive just isn’t there.

So the answer is to “resurrect” molecules in our ancestors.  These peptides will be used as a treatment for antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria and disease.  But peptides are, wait for it … mRNA

So given that the 5 years is too long, why not just model things with Artificial Intelligence?

The proteins in our cells are like long strings. But they often get cut up by enzymes into short fragments at specific junctures. These short fragments — small molecules known as peptides — can have antimicrobial properties.

So, de la Fuente’s team trained an AI model called panCleave, which can look at all the proteins encoded in a genome and predict where their junctures will be. That way, the researchers could identify the peptides in the Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes. They then ran other models on the peptides to predict which ones would have antimicrobial properties.

They weren’t all slam-dunks. When tested on infected mice, some of the peptides predicted to be strong candidates didn’t manage to kill the bacteria.