According to the World Health Organization (WHO), antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is on the rise around the world, with 1.2 million deaths each year being caused by AMR. This makes AMR more deadly than HIV. Sadly, no new antibiotics have been developed over the last 40 years. One of the biggest challenges in new drug discovery is finding the most promising drug candidates from vast libraries of known drug-like molecules.

Using an AI-supported drug design service powered by the Huawei Cloud Pangu Drug Molecule Model, Professor Liu Bing and his team at the First Affiliated Hospital of Xi'an Jiaotong University was able to hugely accelerate the screening of drug molecules. This approach reduced the lead compound discovery time from several years to just one month, and cut R&D costs by 70%. Now, they have successfully discovered a new super antibiotic called Cinnamobactin.

By targeting HU proteins using an innovative bacteriophage-like mechanism that inhibits DNA replication in bacteria, it is expected to become the world's first new antibiotic in nearly 40 years with a brand-new target and in a category of its own.