"Non-Antibiotic Drug Discovery Through Machine Learning for Bacteria Eradication"

Researchers are exploring the potential of nonantibiotic drugs, such as those used to treat cancer, diabetes, and depression, to kill bacteria in different ways from standard antibiotics. A new machine learning method has been developed to identify how nonantibiotics kill bacteria and find new bacterial targets for antibiotics. By analyzing almost 2 million instances of toxicity between 200 drugs and thousands of mutant bacteria, the researchers found that nonantibiotic and antibiotic drugs have different ways of killing bacterial cells. This approach has the potential to address the critical bottleneck in developing antibiotics and uncover new ways to fight bacterial infections and antibiotic resistance.