MIT professors Regina Barzilay and James Collins won the 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence. They use artificial intelligence, or AI, to help find new antibiotics. These are medicines that kill bacteria, including some that other medicines cannot kill.
In 2020, they published their first major paper together with Jonathan Stokes. It described halicin, the first antibiotic found using AI. Scientists first studied it as a possible diabetes medicine.
Tests showed that halicin could kill several kinds of bacteria that some antibiotics could not kill. The search took only a few weeks instead of years. The team used AI to help find the medicine.
In 2023, the researchers worked with Stokes to find another antibiotic, abaucin. It works against one kind of bacteria that is hard to treat. This narrow action lowers the risk of bacteria learning to survive the medicine. It also lowers the risk of harming helpful bacteria in the gut.
Collins says AI is moving beyond finding possible medicines to designing them. Barzilay says AI still handles only parts of the work. She says scientists need better AI models of how the human body works.
