Letters to the Editor | Week of Oct. 21-26, 2024

AI can fight superbugs

You’ve probably heard of artificial intelligence writing college admissions essays or producing authentic-looking “deep fake” images. Less discussed is AI’s potential to help us address health crises.

If deployed properly, AI could equip scientists with tools to fight the rise of drug-resistant superbugs.

Scientists predict that superbugs — bacteria and fungi that have developed resistance to existing medicines — could kill 10 million people per year by 2050. Fortunately, AI has the potential to give humans a leg up on superbugs. But it’ll take the best efforts of the public and private sectors to ensure new drugs are accessible to patients — before it’s too late.

In 2019, superbugs were linked to the deaths of nearly 5 million people worldwide.

Despite this alarming trend, many large companies have stopped researching antimicrobials. That’s not due to lack of scientific promise. It’s because the process is often commercially infeasible.

We need to attack this problem from two ends: optimizing the discovery of treatments and reshaping the antibiotic market with new incentives.

My company and our academic partners are working on the first part of the problem. Using AI, we’re developing new classes of antibiotics that treat the world’s most urgent threats. In days or weeks, AI can do discovery work that would take researchers months or years. Here’s how it works: Researchers expose a pathogen to thousands of chemicals with diverse structures to determine which ones prevent bacterial growth. They use the results to train an AI model to predict which new chemical compounds might be similarly effective.

Researchers then bombard the model with millions to billions of possible molecular structures. AI can virtually screen millions of molecules in an afternoon, no petri dishes required.

AI could shorten the time between drug discovery and the pre-investigation stage from roughly 4.5 to 2.5 years. AI could reduce research expenses to one-third of what they might be otherwise.

Government efforts have a key role to play. The bipartisan PASTEUR Act would create a subscription-like model to ensure that if a company develops a new antimicrobial, it will receive a sufficient return on investment.

My colleagues and I are confident we can outpace antimicrobial resistance scientifically. But we can’t do so on our own. We need a multi-pronged effort that includes a reinvigorated marketplace. The fate of modern medicine depends on it.

Dr. Akhila Kosaraju

CEO and president

Phare Bio

New York City

Immigration change needed

Some 3,201,144 illegal immigrants crossed the U.S. border in 2023, which is the highest year in history. For 2024 about 1,981,177 illegal immigrants have crossed, and we still have more than two months left in the year. If we were able to change our immigration system, then these numbers wouldn’t be so high. We would be able to focus on other major issues concerning our country and border security and immigration.

Let’s accept that the U.S. has one of the most restrictive immigration systems, and there is no flexibility with it. We should get law enforcement to reduce the number of violations by helping immigrants who do not have serious crimes get a permit or employment to stay in the country. If we see that immigrants are responsible, paying their taxes, providing paying their homes/rents, no issues with the law, then we can surely find a way to help them find some sort of legal status. Another option is that we have more than 10.9 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S. Most of them have been in the U.S. for more than a decade with no criminal history. I think our government should provide some sort of permanent legal status to all those who have not committed any serious crimes.

We hear in the news from political officials stating that these immigrants are criminals and drug smugglers. However, research indicates that immigrants commit fewer crimes than U.S.-born people. Recent investigations by The New York Times and the Marshall Project found that between 2007 and 2016, there was no link between undocumented immigrants and a rise in violent or property crime.

In 2013, the Senate passed a comprehensive immigration reform bill to create a new temporary status that requires illegal immigrants to pay three separate fees: a $1000.00 fine, English-language class attendance, a 13-year wait to apply for citizenship and an annual income that is 125% of the poverty line or no unemployment greater than 60 days. However, if these seem a little difficult to achieve due to economic hardships or other emergencies, they should have another option to achieve permanent status without a path to citizenship. This could be cheaper and less difficult to achieve. This can help many who are elderly or do not want to become a citizen of the U.S. due to other family emergencies or economic problems they may have. To change our immigration system, we would need to join organizations such as American immigration Council and the Immigration Advocates Network. We can continue working on the bill the Senate passed in 2013. We can review it and make corrections amendments that will help get this bill passed.

To start we need the public to learn and research our immigration system. Then have the public go to city meetings or state legislation meetings to listen and talk to the people on the board about immigration.

Just stepping foot into this and getting others involved is a start. Once it starts, we continue moving forward and doing everything possible to get heard and hopefully will have a better immigration system.

Alicia Zobal

Harlingen

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