Latest
  1. Visa benchmark finds AI shopping agents fail 42.8% of runs
  2. OpenAI releases GPT-6 Cyber for approved security customers
  3. Google releases Gemini Omni 1.2 Flash with 15-second video clips
  4. Sierra acquires Anon to give its AI agents browser access
  5. Shield AI to buy counter-drone radar maker Echodyne for $5.3 billion
  6. Dropbox agrees to buy Tigris Data for $350m to expand its AI infrastructure
  7. About 600,000 Nvidia H200 chips are stored in Hong Kong awaiting Chinese approval
  8. Anthropic’s compute costs rose to 58% of revenue in Q3, its IPO filing shows

Latest / Health and life sciences

ResearchHealthScienceFrontierUSConfirmed

MIT professors win Pritzker Prize for AI-discovered antibiotic

See how this story connects

Source: MIT News

Regina Barzilay and James Collins, MIT professors, received the 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence for pioneering AI-enabled antibiotic discovery. Their 2020 paper in Cell described halicin, the first AI-discovered antibiotic, found by a deep learning model trained on 2,500 molecules. Halicin killed drug-resistant bacteria including Clostridium difficile, Acinetobacter baumannii and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. With Jonathan Stokes, they later used machine learning to identify abaucin in 2023, a narrow-spectrum antibiotic effective against A. baumannii.

Why it matters

The halicin discovery, a process that once took years, was completed in a few weeks, which the researchers say shows AI can be an effective tool for finding new antibiotics amid growing antimicrobial resistance.

When
2 Nov 2026
ID
WTA-N-2026-0672
Who
MIT, University of Chicago, Caltech, McMaster University; Regina Barzilay, James Collins, Jonathan Stokes

Summary written with AI by wheresthe.ai, from MIT News. Checked against the source on 2 Nov 2026.

Read the original at MIT News

Source copy: saved on 4 Nov 2026 to check this story and not republished, because the text belongs to its publisher. Also held by the Internet Archive.

Earlier in this Storyline: What led hereAI helps McMaster and MIT find abaucin, an antibiotic against a hospital superbug

Cite this story

WTA-N-2026-0672: “MIT professors win Pritzker Prize for AI-discovered antibiotic.” wheresthe.ai, 2 Nov 2026. https://wheresthe.ai/d/us-mit-professors-win-pritzker-prize-for-ai-discovered-antib-2026-11/ (source: MIT News).

Spotted an error? Email [email protected].