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 James Collins received the 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence for their joint work using AI to discover antibiotics against drug-resistant bacteria.
Regina Barzilay and James Collins, both professors at MIT, are the recipients of the 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence, MIT News reported. The award recognizes their joint work in AI-enabled antibiotic discovery, which combines deep learning, bioengineering and experimental validation to identify new antibacterial candidates against drug-resistant pathogens.
The University of Chicago established the prize in 2024 in partnership with Caltech. It honors contributions that jointly advance AI and the natural sciences or engineering. Barzilay and Collins are faculty co-leads of the Abdul Latif Jameel Clinic for Machine Learning in Health.
Their first paper together appeared in the journal Cell in 2020, with Jonathan Stokes, then an MIT postdoctoral researcher in the Collins lab, as first author. It described halicin, which MIT calls the first AI-discovered antibiotic. Halicin was originally studied as a possible diabetes drug. A deep learning model trained on 2,500 molecules identified it, and in testing it killed resistant bacteria including Clostridium difficile, Acinetobacter baumannii and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. According to MIT, a discovery process that once took years was finished in a few weeks.
In 2023, the two worked with Stokes, now an assistant professor at McMaster University, to identify abaucin using machine learning. Abaucin is a narrow-spectrum antibiotic that works against A. baumannii, a resistant bacterium commonly found in hospitals. MIT notes that its narrow focus on a single species is its main advantage, since it lowers the likelihood of resistance developing and spares beneficial gut bacteria.
Collins said antibiotic discovery has long relied on slow, costly trial and error, and he described "a shift from AI being used as a tool for discovery to AI being used as a design tool." Barzilay was more cautious, saying "we are still in early stages of drug discovery." She said AI can currently automate only parts of the pipeline, and that realistic AI models of human biology will be needed to go further.
Note: The headline calls it the Pritzker Prize for AI and Science Research Excellence. The page gives the name as the Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence.
At a Glance
- The 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence went to MIT's Regina Barzilay and James Collins.
- The University of Chicago created the prize in 2024 in partnership with Caltech.
- Halicin, described in a 2020 Cell paper, was identified by a deep learning model trained on 2,500 molecules.
- Abaucin, identified in 2023, is a narrow-spectrum antibiotic that targets Acinetobacter baumannii.
Sources
This brief was written by Brightside Report from the reporting linked above. Spot an error? Request a correction.