The top candidates they discovered are structurally distinct from any existing antibiotics, and they appear to work by novel mechanisms that disrupt bacterial cell membranes. This makes them less vulnerable to antibiotic resistance, a growing problem: It is estimated that drug-­resistant bacterial infections cause nearly 5 million deaths per year worldwide.

Now that they can generate and evaluate compounds that have never been seen before, the researchers hope they can use the same strategy to identify and design drugs that attack other species of bacteria.

“We’re excited about the new possibilities that this project opens up for antibiotics development,” says James Collins, a professor of biological engineering and the senior author of the study. “Our work shows the power of AI from a drug design standpoint and enables us to exploit much larger chemical spaces that were previously inaccessible.”