Presidential Associate Professor University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States
Description: For a century, antibiotic discovery has depended on labor-intensive “dirt mining”: scientists collected soil or water samples and painstakingly screening them for active compounds. That trial-and-error paradigm is too slow to keep pace with escalating antimicrobial resistance. In this talk, I will discuss how our lab has moved beyond this paradigm over the past decade by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to digitally mine the world’s biological information—genomes, proteomes, and metagenomes.
Learning Objectives: - Understand how artificial intelligence can accelerate antibiotic discovery by mining large biological datasets - Explore breakthroughs in discovering novel antimicrobial peptides across the human proteome, ancient organisms, and the global microbiome - Learn about next-generation AI models (APEX, ApexGo, ApexDuo) and their role in optimizing and generating therapeutic candidates
