TechSocials February 2026 Tue, Feb. 10, 2026

In association with KQCodes, ARC proudly presents the TechSocial Series. In February, we will be joined ONLINE by James Collins a Professor from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to talk about Deep Learning for Antibiotic Discovery. This work was published in the journal Cell Research and featured in the news in 2025.

A series of FREE, informal TALKS, DISCUSSION and PIZZA! Open to anyone interested in computational research methods, technology and innovation, this series covers a broad range of tools, programs, digital environments & language.

Join us every month at 90 High Holborn

Talk Title: Deep Learning for Antibiotic Discovery

Abstract

In this talk, we highlight the Antibiotics-AI Project, which is a multi-disciplinary, innovative research program that is leveraging MIT's strengths in artificial intelligence, bioengineering, and the life sciences to discover and design novel classes of antibiotics. The Antibiotics-AI Project is focused on developing, integrating and implementing deep learning models and chemogenomic screening approaches: (1) to predict novel antibiotics from expansive chemical libraries with diverse properties, (2) to design de novo novel antibiotics based on learned structural and functional properties of existing and newly discovered antibiotics, and (3) to identify, using explainable deep learning models, the chemical structures and molecular mechanisms underlying the newly discovered and/or designed antibiotics. With these deep learning approaches, we are utilizing multi-scale computation to embrace and harness the complexity of biology and chemistry, so as to discover, design and develop new classes of antibiotics, up through preclinical studies. Our platform has been designed so that it can be utilized and applied in a rapid fashion to emerging and re-emerging bacterial pathogens, including multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria and extensively drug-resistant (XDR) bacteria.

About the speaker
Jim Collins is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, as well as a Member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences & Technology Faculty. He is also a Core Founding Faculty member of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, and an Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Collins is one of the founders of the field of synthetic biology, and his research group is currently focused on using synthetic biology to create next-generation diagnostics and therapeutics as well as programmable molecular tools for the life sciences. Collins is also the Director of the Antibiotics-AI Project at MIT and co-founder of Phare Bio, a non-profit focused on AI-driven antibiotic discovery. Collins has received numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur "Genius" Award, the Dickson Prize in Medicine, and the Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology, and he is an elected member of all three national academies - the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the National Academy of Medicine.

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