Humanity is losing the arms race against microbes. The last new class of antibiotics was discovered in the late 1980s; since then, pipeline advances have been purely incremental. Some experts predict that by 2050, the global death toll from antimicrobial resistance could surpass that of cancer and cardiovascular disease.
Through powerful survivor narratives, in-depth expert interviews, interactive visualizations, and poignant video, this Pulitzer Center-funded project explains how AI is revolutionizing medicine by predicting, designing, and developing new antibiotics never envisioned by nature. Powerful algorithms are sifting through massive datasets of bacterial genomes to identify potentially promising molecules and designing new molecules from scratch.
This modern approach to solving one of humanity’s greatest existential threats had never before been comprehensively detailed in the popular press. The strategy focused on humanizing an abstract global health threat and making complex computational biology accessible to a wide audience.
