AI builds proteins to kill superbugs and cancer in seconds

HEALTH/SCIENCE

In the past year, there’s been a surge in proteins developed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) that will eventually be used to treat everything from snakebite to cancer. What would normally take decades for scientists to create — a custom-made protein for a particular disease — can now be done in seconds.

For the first time, Australian scientists have used AI to generate a ready-to-use biological protein, in this case, one that can kill antibiotic resistant bacteria such as E. coli.

AI also offers a new way to combat the growing crisis caused by antibiotic resistant superbugs. By using AI in this way, Australia joins the US and China in having developed AI platforms capable of rapidly generating thousands of ready-to-use proteins, paving the way for faster, more affordable drug development and diagnostics that could transform biomedical research and patient care.

Dr Rhys Grinter, who co-leads the new AI Protein Design Program with nodes at the University of Melbourne Bio21 Institute and Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, says this work is the first in Australia that models the work done by David Baker — who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year — developing an end-to-end approach that could create a wide range of proteins.

The program uses AI-driven protein design tools that are freely available for scientists everywhere. “It’s important to democratise protein design so that the whole world has the ability to leverage these tools,” says Daniel Fox, the PhD student who performed most of the experimental work to develop the process. "Using these tools and those we are developing in-house, we can engineer proteins to bind a specific target site . . . as inhibitors, agonists or antagonists, or engineered enzymes with improved activity and stability.”

At the moment, Grinter says, “These new methods in deep learning enable efficient de novo design of proteins with specific characteristics and functions, lowering the cost and accelerating the development of novel protein binders and engineered enzymes.”

Professor John Carroll, Director of the Monash Biomedicine Discovery Institute, says the new program brings Australia “right up to speed in this exciting new modality for designing novel therapeutics and research tools”.

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