Predicting and Generating Antibiotics Against Future Pathogens with ApexOracle
The accelerating crisis of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) demands new computational methods to stay ahead of evolving pathogens. ApexOracle is a unified ML platform designed to both predict the activity of candidate compounds against specific bacterial strains and generate novel molecules de novo, proactively targeting future superbugs. Motivation and Scope Global Impact: AMR contributes to nearly 5 million deaths annually. Traditional Challenges: Standard drug discovery pipelines are slow, resource-intensive, and reactive. ApexOracle Goal: Integrate genomic context and molecular design into one end-to-end framework. ApexOracle Architecture Layman’s Explanation: Imagine you have three sets of clues: the code of the bacteria (its genome), a simple description of its behaviors (like a basic fact sheet), and the building blocks of a potential drug (a molecular recipe). ApexOracle acts like a super-smart detective that reads all three clues at once. It combines them, figures out which molecules might work best, and even drafts entirely new molecular recipes that could stop the bacteria in its tracks. ...