Imagine you’re a fossil hunter. You spend months in the heat of Arizona digging up bones only to find that what you’ve uncovered is from a previously discovered dinosaur.

That’s how the search for antibiotics has panned out recently. The relatively few antibiotic hunters out there keep finding the same types of antibiotics.

With the rapid rise in drug resistance in many pathogens, new antibiotics are desperately needed. It may be only a matter of time before a wound or scratch becomes life-threatening. Yet few new antibiotics have entered the market of late, and even these are just minor variants of old antibiotics.

Although the prospects look bleak, the recent revolution in artificial intelligence (AI) offers new hope. In a study published in February 2020 in the journal Cell, scientists from MIT and Harvard used a type of AI called deep learning to discover new antibiotics.

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