{"id":234947,"date":"2026-04-10T10:09:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-10T15:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/the-scientist-using-ai-to-hunt-for-antibiotics-just-about-everywhere"},"modified":"2026-04-10T10:09:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-10T15:09:12","slug":"the-scientist-using-ai-to-hunt-for-antibiotics-just-about-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/04\/the-scientist-using-ai-to-hunt-for-antibiotics-just-about-everywhere","title":{"rendered":"The scientist using AI to hunt for antibiotics just about everywhere"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-scientist-using-ai-to-hunt-for-antibiotics-just-about-everywhere.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>When he was just a teenager trying to decide what to do with his life, C\u00e9sar de la Fuente compiled a list of the world\u2019s biggest problems. He ranked them inversely by how much money governments were spending to solve them. Antimicrobial resistance topped the list.<\/p>\n<p>Twenty years on, the problem has not gone away. If anything, it\u2019s gotten worse. Infections caused by bacteria, fungi, and viruses that have evolved ways to evade treatments are now associated with more than 4 million deaths per year, and a recent analysis, published in the <em>Lancet<\/em>, predicts that number could surge past 8 million by 2050. In a <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1103\/y3fg-s9vg\">July 2025 essay<\/a> in <em>Physical Review Letters<\/em>, de la Fuente, now a bioengineer and computational biologist, and synthetic biologist James Collins warned of a looming \u201cpostantibiotic\u201d era in which infections from drug-resistant strains of common bacteria like <em>Escherichia coli <\/em>or <em>Staphylococcus aureus<\/em>, which can often still be treated by our current arsenal of medications, become fatal. \u201cThe antibiotic discovery pipeline remains perilously thin,\u201d they wrote, \u201cimpeded by high development costs, lengthy timelines, and low returns on investment.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When he was just a teenager trying to decide what to do with his life, C\u00e9sar de la Fuente compiled a list of the world\u2019s biggest problems. He ranked them inversely by how much money governments were spending to solve them. Antimicrobial resistance topped the list. Twenty years on, the problem has not gone away. [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":367,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1902,11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-234947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bioengineering","category-biotech-medical","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/367"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=234947"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/234947\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=234947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=234947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=234947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}