Fighting drug-resistant bacteria with AI-designed nanomaterials

Assistant Professor Lisa M. Stabryla is one of only four researchers from the Chicago area to receive a What If…? Award for Creative Medical Research from the Science Philanthropy Alliance.

The What If…? Awards Program is a new philanthropic initiative designed to catalyze innovative early-stage research in biomedical and health science. The program supports high-risk, high-reward projects that pose bold “What If…?” questions in areas ranging from neurodegenerative diseases and cancer to artificial intelligence in clinical care and antimicrobial resistance.

Stabryla received $500,000 in pilot funding over two years for the project “What if we could fight drug-resistant bacteria with AI-designed nanomaterials?”

Antimicrobial resistance is making wound infections increasingly challenging to treat, underscoring the need for alternatives to conventional antibiotics. Metal and metal oxide nanoparticles, especially silver-based formulations (AgNPs), represent a promising class of antimicrobials already used in wound dressings and medical device coatings.

“Our preliminary findings indicate that clinically relevant bacteria can adapt to and develop resistance against specific AgNP designs. Yet, our work also shows that variations in AgNP design can dramatically enhance antimicrobial efficacy,” said Stabryla, director of the Stabryla Lab at UIC. “These results highlight the urgency and the opportunity: nanoparticle properties are tunable, but the relationships between design parameters, antimicrobial performance, and evolutionary outcomes in bacteria remain poorly understood.”

For this research, Stabryla and her team plan to rationally design next-generation, “evolution-resilient” nanoparticles by linking size, shape, and other physicochemical geometric/morphological properties to antimicrobial efficacy and bacterial adaptation pathways. They will integrate laboratory evolution under controlled conditions, whole-genome sequencing, and a machine learning–based generative design model to identify nanoparticle designs that maximize antimicrobial activity while minimizing or redirecting the evolution of resistance.

This generative approach, led by Assistant Professor Jida Huang of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, is essential for efficiently exploring this vast design space and navigating the thousands of possible nanoparticle designs that cannot be tested experimentally to identify the most promising candidates. Outside of engineering, the interdisciplinary team also includes Research Assistant Professor William Ackerman of the College of Medicine, Perinatal Research Laboratory, and Kyunghee Han of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science.

“Rather than focusing on optimization of a single material in isolation, this approach will set the stage for conceptualizing nanoparticles as tools that can be designed to work together as part of a larger engineered system,” Stabryla said. “By deliberately combining different nanoparticle designs, we can tune how they work together – using complementary or opposing effects – to create ‘evolutionary traps’ that reduce the chances of bacteria adapting and developing resistance. Promising candidates will be chemically synthesized, tested against pathogenic bacteria, and incorporated into a prototype polymeric nanocomposite coating for future clinical application. The outcome of this work could accelerate antimicrobial materials discovery and enable new infection-control technologies that improve patient safety and reduce the burden of antimicrobial resistance.”

The Science Philanthropy Alliance is the world’s first and longest-standing organization dedicated to advising philanthropists on giving to discovery science. Founded in 2014, the Alliance has grown into a vibrant network of 44 member organizations and a global community of funders, scientists, and advisors committed to advancing scientific discovery for the benefit of humanity.