From 7,000 drugs to one active against resistant strains: AI advances pneumonia drug repurposing

by Wiley

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Streptococcus pneumoniae is a bacterial pathogen that causes life-threatening infections, including pneumonia and meningitis. These infections are commonly treated with antibiotics, but antibiotics are becoming less effective against S. pneumoniae over time because of changes in the pathogen that cause drug resistance. This phenomenon, called antimicrobial resistance, is resulting in significant health care costs and deaths around the world. In a new study published by Wiley in Advanced Science, researchers used artificial intelligence (AI) to identify approved drugs that may be effective against S. pneumoniae.

Drug repurposing, or the use of drugs with known safety profiles for different purposes, saves time and costs while reducing risk. This process is even more efficient with computational strategies to select promising candidates. AI has been used to predict drugs for repurposing against other pathogens on the World Health Organization (WHO)'s antibiotic development priority list. Now, researchers have used enhanced learning approaches and diverse models to screen a drug library for S. pneumoniae, another of the WHO's priorities for antimicrobial resistance.

Using a data set of molecules shown to be active against S. pneumoniae and a larger data set of molecules inactive against another drug-resistant bacterium, the scientists trained three different learning algorithms: ensembles of decision trees, ensembles of graph neural networks and ensembles of sequence-based transformers (each previously pretrained with hundreds of millions of molecules). These different AI models were used to test nearly 7,000 candidate drugs for inhibition of S. pneumoniae.

From screening to lab testing

Of these nearly 7,000 candidates, 11 were selected for experimental validation. Nine of the compounds were able to inhibit the growth of S. pneumoniae. One of the two most potent repurposed drugs was effective even against drug-resistant strains of S. pneumoniae. The authors said using three diverse AI models complemented each other in the selection of candidate drugs, making them more efficacious together than individually.

These findings underscore the benefits of using AI models to identify novel drugs and rationally select drugs with the highest potential for repurposing. In a field like antimicrobial resistance, where there is an urgent need for effective compounds, AI-driven computational drug repurposing is a streamlined and affordable strategy with demonstrated success.

"AI-guided drug repurposing has become a powerful strategy for combating antimicrobial resistance, particularly for pathogens for which some active molecules are already known and can be leveraged as a training or fine-tuning data set," said senior author Pedro J. Ballester, associate professor at Imperial College London and Wolfson Fellow of the Royal Society in the United Kingdom.

Publication details

Artificial intelligence-guided phenotypic drug repurposing against Streptococcus pneumoniae, Advanced Science (2026). DOI: 10.1002/advs.76959

Journal information: Advanced Science

Key medical concepts

Streptococcus pneumoniaeAntimicrobial Resistance

Clinical categories

Infectious diseasesClinical pharmacology Provided by Wiley Who's behind this story?

Gaby Clark

MA in English, copy editor since 2021 with experience in higher education and health content. Dedicated to trustworthy science news. Full profile →

Robert Egan

Bachelor's in mathematical biology, Master's in creative writing. Well-traveled with unique perspectives on science and language. Full profile →

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