IID Seminar Series – Melis Anahatar

Title Talk

“Deep learning-enabled discovery and design of antibiotics“

Antibiotic-resistant infections are becoming an increasingly urgent public health threat, yet few structurally novel antibiotics have reached patients in recent decades, in part because discovering them through traditional methods is inefficient and expensive. This talk explores how deep learning can accelerate the antibiotic discovery process in two ways: by using AI models to rapidly screen large chemical libraries and identify promising antibacterial candidates that would otherwise be missed, and by using generative AI to design entirely new molecules that don’t yet exist in any library. Both methods can identify candidates working through mechanisms distinct from existing antibiotics with retained efficacy against multidrug-resistant strains. Together, this work illustrates the promise and remaining challenges to use AI for antibiotic discovery.

Zoom Link

Password: 540202

Speaker Information

Melis N. Anahtar, MD, PhD

Principal Investigator at Massachusetts General Hospital

Melis N. Anahtat is a physician-scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital, where she leads a research lab and serve as an assistant director of the Clinical Microbiology laboratory.

Research Interests
Antibiotic discovery, antimicrobial resistance, diagnostic development, machine learning, vaginal microbiome, host-microbiome interactions.

Clinical Interests
Genomic sequencing, antimicrobial susceptibility testing, molecular testing

THIS SPEAKER WILL BE IN PERSON IN  FXB 301. 
The event will be hybrid.