Expanding Our Search for Antibiotics: Encrypted Biology, Ancient Datasets and AI
As seen in BioTechniques

Antimicrobial resistance is projected to kill ten million people a year by 2050. Finding new antibiotics is urgent. And the places scientists are looking for them are getting increasingly surprising.

At ELRIG Drug Discovery 2025 in Liverpool, some of the most ambitious researchers in the field gathered to share where their science is heading. César de la Fuente, Presidential Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of them. He spoke to BioTechniques about using AI to hunt for antibiotic candidates in places nobody had thought to look: from the human proteome to Neanderthal DNA, and the genomes of woolly mammoths and giant sloths.

Drug discovery has always required creativity. But what César is doing pushes that further than most. He talks openly about the years of uncertainty, the failed iterations, and the moment it wasn’t clear whether they were weeks or years away from a breakthrough.