Scientists are harnessing artificial intelligence to design viruses that can hunt down and destroy superbugs, offering a potential breakthrough in the fight against antibiotic resistance. Researchers at Flinders University, led by Professor Rob Edwards, have sequenced samples from nearly one in five South Australian cystic fibrosis patients as part of this pioneering work.
Understanding Phages
Professor Edwards, a global leader in microbial genomics and bioinformatics, focuses on phages—viruses that infect and replicate within bacteria, ultimately destroying them. Over the past two decades, the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria has become a critical global health crisis, and phages may hold the key to new treatments.
“Nowadays bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics and there’s not much we can do about it,” Professor Edwards explains. “So, myself and other researchers, both in Australia and internationally, have been looking at ways to revisit the use of phages—can we use phages again to treat bacterial infections?”
AI-Driven Discovery
Artificial intelligence has revolutionised the field, enabling scientists to design viruses with precision. “It’s completely changed the way that we work in terms of writing software to analyse data, helping us bring in new ideas and new approaches for analysis,” Professor Edwards says. “We’re also training AI to answer the questions we want to ask and guiding it providing those guardrails that are so essential with AI to ensure we’re going in the right direction.”
The speed of AI-driven biological discovery is unprecedented. “It’s absolutely phenomenal what’s happened in the last few years, and the speed with which AI is changing our understanding of biology is huge,” he adds.
Impact on Cystic Fibrosis
Professor Edwards and his team have sequenced samples from almost one in five South Australians with cystic fibrosis to better understand chronic respiratory diseases. “Cystic fibrosis is a disease where there have been great strides leveraging AI that have really changed the course of the disease, but people with cystic fibrosis are still exposed to lots of antibiotics and are at significant risk of antibiotic-resistant bacteria,” he notes. “We take a sample from somebody and sequence the DNA, then use AI to try to understand the bacteria and viruses that are present.”
Future Prospects
Over the next decade, the fusion of synthetic biology and powerful digital technologies is expected to unlock new possibilities. “I think that synthetic biology, combined with these amazing digital tools, is really going to open a whole new world of drugs, chemicals and pharmaceuticals that we can use to treat conditions that have previously been a real challenge,” Professor Edwards says.
In a world grappling with antibiotic resistance and emerging diseases, the answers may not lie in building something bigger—but in understanding something smaller. As Professor Edwards’ work demonstrates, when it comes to microbes, little things really can grow into something transformative.
