Jameel Clinic co-lead Jim Collins and collaborators awarded up to USD 27m by Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health for antimicrobial resistance platform

• The award from the United States government agency will fuel advances in the discovery of new antibiotics by a team including Professor Jim Collins.

• Jim is faculty lead for life sciences at the Jameel Clinic, the epicentre of artificial intelligence and health at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• The newly-funded effort builds on the 2019 deep learning-enabled discovery of the antibiotic halicin by Jameel Clinic researchers and collaborators and aims to tackle the rising threat of antimicrobial resistance.

Community Jameel congratulates Professor Jim Collins, faculty lead for life sciences at the Jameel Clinic at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Phare Bio and Wyss Institute at Harvard University on receiving an award of up to USD 27 million from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) for the ‘Transforming antibiotic research and development with generative artificial intelligence to stop emerging threats’ (TARGET) project.

Aiming to rapidly scale and optimise a generative artificial intelligence (AI) discovery platform to thwart the growing escalation of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), the TARGET team will use the funds to create the first open-source database for AI-based antibiotic discovery and introduce over a dozen novel antibiotics into Phare Bio’s preclinical pipeline.

AMR is one of the greatest existential threats facing humanity. In 2019, nearly 1.3 million people died from resistant infections. By 2050, the death toll from AMR is expected to reach 10 million annually, surpassing cancer as a leading cause of death. For most of the 20th century, as resistance to specific antibiotics grew, physicians could rely on the discovery and development of new antibiotics to replace them. Now, however, challenging market conditions and limited investment have led to a decades-long discovery drought and a dwindling antibiotics pipeline.

Launched in 2018 as the epicentre of AI and health at MIT, the Jameel Clinic incubates research with the belief that AI presents a powerful opportunity to improve the early detection of disease – cancer, neurodegenerative disorders and a host of chronic disease such as diabetes, kidney disease and asthma – and aid in the personalisation of treatment for these diseases.

In 2019, Jim, his Jameel Clinic co-lead Professor Regina Barzilay and collaborators used a deep learning approach to discover halicin as a powerful new antibiotic candidate capable of killing antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis and the superbug C. diff, and in 2023 they discovered abaucin, an antibiotic compound effective against Acinetobacter baumannii, one of the three superbugs identified by the World Health Organisation as a critical threat to humanity.

Following the 2019 discovery of halicin, in 2020 Jim helped found Phare Bio, a social venture that uses AI to develop novel classes of antibiotics, in partnership with Jim's lab at MIT and the Wyss Institute.

In 2020, Phare Bio received funding from the Audacious Project, a collaborative funding initiative between Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED), founder of the TED talks, and other non-profits to unlock social impact on a grand scale.

The ARPA-H funding will enable the TARGET team to:

• generate millions of new training data points across key drug development parameters (e.g., toxicology, drug metabolism and formulation) to enable more clinical precision in AI-based drug discovery efforts;

• share their expertly curated datasets in the first open-source database for AI-based antibiotic discovery, galvanising the next generation of antibiotics researchers;

• leverage their data to incorporate up to 10 new filters into Phare Bio’s generative AI drug discovery engine to produce novel and targeted antibiotics against specific bacterial disease indications (e.g., drug-resistant urinary tract infections, pneumonia and sepsis); and

• advance 15 novel AI-generated preclinical antibiotic candidates to help replenish the global pipeline of urgently needed antimicrobials.

Professor Jim Collins, faculty lead for life sciences, MIT Jameel Clinic, said: “This funding allows us to advance this critical work a step further towards a bespoke, active-learning AI-based platform. Such a tailored AI platform that can target specific clinical needs has yet to be developed across drug discovery, let alone for antibiotics.”

Akhila Kosaraju, chief executive officer and president, Phare Bio, said: “The AMR crisis is accelerating, but with this collaboration with ARPA-H, another door is opening. These funds allow Phare Bio to add unprecedented clinical precision to our generative AI discovery platform and develop the novel and specific antibiotics that patients and physicians so vitally need.”

An agency of the United States government’s department of health and human services, ARPA-H is tasked with supporting transformative research to drive biomedical and health breakthroughs.

Xavier Becerra, secretary of health and human services, announced ARPA-H’s award of funding to the TARGET project on 26 September 2024 at the 79th United Nations General Assembly.