AI Reports · MIT · 2026-11-02 · Event
Regina Barzilay and Jim Collins win Pritzker Prize for AI and Science Research Excellence for work in AI-enabled antibiotic discovery
MIT professors Regina Barzilay and Jim Collins received the 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence for their work on AI-enabled antibiotic discovery. In 2020, they published a paper in Cell describing halicin, the first AI-discovered antibiotic, which a deep learning model trained on 2,500 molecules identified. Halicin is a broad-spectrum antibiotic that was originally studied as a potential diabetes drug.