Using AI to fight drug-resistant bacteria
When we think of traditional civil and environmental engineering research, some fields spring quickly to mind, including pollution control efforts in the natural environment, designing infrastructure systems like roads, airports, bridges, and water supply networks. Yet, understanding and improving the health of various built environments that serve society, such as hospitals and healthcare clinics, can fall into the realm of environmental engineering, and that is where one project commencing in the Civil, Materials, and Environmental Engineering Department will have the most impact.
“With our increased understanding of a hospital’s microbiome, i.e., the full range of pathogenic bacteria, viruses, and fungi that can be found in a hospital, it is of increasing importance that we develop and implement more effective infection prevention/infection control strategies within these types of facilities to protect human health,” said Assistant Professor Lisa M. Stabryla, director of the Stabryla Lab.
Stabryla emphasizes the important role of materials when engineering interventions. For this work, she is designing materials to combat emerging strains of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and make it harder for bacteria to develop resistance in the first place.
“Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is a major global public health threat. Nanomaterials — containing particles smaller than 100 nanometers in size (significantly smaller than a strand of human hair)—applied as surface coatings on medical devices (e.g., catheters, surgical instruments, wound dressings) could help prevent infections, especially in vulnerable patients and especially if designed rationally,” she said. “We don’t want to keep designing new antibiotics with the high likelihood of bacteria developing resistance to them quickly, making them ineffective after a short period of use.”
Stabryla added these nanotechnologies could be designed in a way that reduces the social, environmental, and economic impact of drug-resistant bacteria and has a long-lasting effect for the benefit of public health.
To achieve this goal faster, the research being conducted in her lab alongside a team of investigators combines machine learning with lab experiments to optimize nanomaterial design and identify promising structures that elicit enhanced antibacterial activity without selecting for negative consequences such as bacterial resistance.
“Instead of taking a laborious trial-and-error approach in synthesizing different designs and then testing their antimicrobial activity in the lab, I’m working with a team of investigators on developing a machine-learning based, inverse-design model where we can input all the antimicrobial activity data we’ve collected from the literature, as well as empirically in our own lab. The output of such a model will be a narrow subset of candidate material structures or shapes that we can then test in the lab that may yield the higher levels of antimicrobial activity and minimized bacterial resistance outcomes that we want,” she said.
This research is one of several projects supported by seed funding from the Institute for Health Data Science Research. The institute, an initiative of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research at UIC, aims to bridge data science and computing research on campus with healthcare research while fostering interdisciplinary collaboration across the university. Building on the broad scientific strengths and health equity mission of UIC, the institute unites experts from across campus to maximize the potential and minimize the consequences of using AI in medical research and care.
In addition to Stabryla, team members include Jida Huang, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Kyunghee Han, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science, and William E. Ackerman IV, MD, research associate professor in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology.
“This is a very interdisciplinary project, which is unique and exciting to have vastly different expertise brought together. Naturally, the development of innovative solutions likely to have the greatest impact on public health are going to lie at the intersection of different fields,” she said. “This research has the potential to revolutionize any antimicrobial application, whether that is in the clinic or drinking water disinfection, food preparation surfaces, and food safety, anywhere where antimicrobial function is needed to inactivate pathogens. This could potentially yield long-lasting solutions to prevent infection and benefit public health.”