Episode Details

Jim Collins is one of the leading biomedical engineers in the world. He’s been elected to all 3 National Academies (Engineering, Science, and Medicine) and is one of the founders of the field of synthetic biology. In this conversation, we reviewed the seminal discoveries that he and his colleagues are making at the Antibiotics-AI Project at MIT.

Recorded 5 February 2024, transcript below with audio links and external links to recent publications

Eric Topol (00:05):

Hello, it's Eric Topol with Ground Truths, and I have got an extraordinary guest with me today, Jim Collins, who's the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering at MIT. He also holds appointments at the Wyss Institute and the Broad Institute. He is a biomedical engineer who's been making exceptional contributions and has been on a tear lately, especially in the work of discovery of very promising, exciting developments in antibiotics. So welcome, Jim.

Jim Collins (00:42):

Eric, thanks for having me on the podcast.

Eric Topol (00:44):

Well, this was a shock when I saw your paper in Nature in December about a new structure class of antibiotics, the one from 1962 to 2000. It took 38 years, and then there was another one that took 24 years yours, the structural antibiotics. Before I get to that though, I want to go back just a few years to the work you did published in Cell with halicin, and can you tell us about this? Because when I started to realize what you've been doing, what you've been chipping away here, this was a drug you found, halicin, as I can try to understand, it works against tuberculosis, c. difficile, enterobacter that are resistant, acinetobacter that are resistant. I mean, this is, and this is of course in mice models. Can you tell us how did you make that discovery before we get into I guess what's called the Audacious Project?

Jim Collins (01:48):

Yeah, sure. It's actually a fun story, so it is origins go broadly to institute wide event at MIT, so MIT in 2018 launched a major campus-wide effort focused on artificial intelligence. The institute, which had played a major role in the first wave of AI in the 1950s, 1960s, and a major wave in the second wave in the 1980s found itself kind of at the wheel in this third wave involving big data and deep learning and looked to correct that and to correct it the institute had a symposium and I had the opportunity to sit next to Regina Barzilay, one of our faculty here at MIT who specializes in AI and particularly AI applied to biomedicine and we really hit it off and realized we had interest in applying AI to drug discovery. My lab had focused on antibiotics to then close to 15 years, but primarily we're using machine learning and network biology to understand the mechanism of action of antibiotics and how resistance arise with the goal of boosting what we already had, with Regina we saw there w