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0:00
Hi, my name is
Cesar de la Fuente,
and I'm a Presidential
Associate Professor at
University of Pennsylvania.
Today I'd like to tell you about
how we've been using,
for a number of years now,
artificial intelligence
approaches for
antibiotic discovery.
0:18
Antibiotic resistance is a
huge global health problem.
It affects every
corner of the world.
I could make the case that it is
the most underinvested area that
affects the most
people in the world.
We can see here,
currently antimicrobial-resistant
infections—these are
bacterial infections,
they are associated with
millions of deaths
every single year.
The current projection
is that by 2050,
that number is going
to go up to about
10 million deaths per
year around the world.
As we can see here
that this is going to
surpass every other
major cause of death in
our society, including
cancer, diabetes,
and many other causes of death.
If we do a quick calculation,
those 10 million deaths
per year actually
correspond to about one
death every three seconds.
Really, this is a huge
global health problem that
affects really all of us,
and we can refer to it as
a silent pandemic where
we need to do
something about it.
Throughout my whole career,
I've been really passionate
about this huge problem,
and I have been trying to
think of out-of-the-box
methods or
approaches to try
to counter AMR.
1:31
In my lab, I'm really
fortunate to be
working at this
intersection between
machines and biology.
We believe that
by using the power of machines,
we can accelerate discoveries in
biology and medicine,
including antibiotic discovery.
I'm really fortunate
to be able to
work with people that
come to my lab from
all walks of life and from
many different
parts of the world.
Many of them have
different ways of
thinking about problems and
they have different expertise.
To give you an example,
right now in my lab
we have people with
computer science backgrounds,
with chemistry backgrounds,
people that are microbiologists,
engineers, and so on.
We all work together to try to
tackle a lot of the things that
I'm going to describe today.
I'm going to talk about
all of this chronologically and
how I got into this
field and so on.
