A complex problem that took scientists a decade to explain was solved in just two days by a new artificial intelligence (AI) tool, the BBC has reported. 

Professor José Penadés and his team at from the Imperial College London Department of Infectious Disease had spent 10 years demonstrating why some superbugs are immune to antibiotics. 

Then, a partnership between Imperial, the Fleming Initiative, and Google gave the scientists access to a powerful new artificial intelligence, designed to make research faster and more efficient. 

Google has published the first test results of its AI ‘co-scientist’ system, in which academics from a handful of top-universities asked a question to help them make progress in their field of biomedical research. 

The Fleming Initiative, which is a partnership between Imperial College London and Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, aims to address the drivers of antimicrobial resistance (AMR), develop international networks of AMR expertise, and outline strategic research themes to rapidly advance solutions to these urgent challenges. 

Professor Penadés said: “Laboratory science is resource-intensive, and with global challenges like antimicrobial resistance looming, it’s clear we need to do more with less and speed up new discoveries. When the Google research team approached us to test its AI platform, we realised we needed to task it with the same scientific questions that we had already explored ourselves and used as the basis of our experimental work. 

“This effectively meant that the algorithm was able to look at the available evidence, analyse the possibilities, ask questions, design experiments, and propose the very same hypothesis that we arrived at through years of painstaking scientific research, but in a fraction of the time.” 

 “This type of AI ‘co-scientist’ platform is still at an early stage, but we can already see how it has the potential to supercharge science.”

Diana Spencer, Senior Digital Content Editor, DDW