Regina Barzilay and Jim Collins win Pritzker Prize for AI and Science Research Excellence for work in AI-enabled antibiotic discovery

MIT's Regina Barzilay and James Collins received the 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence for their joint work in AI-enabled antibiotic discovery. Their 2020 Cell paper with first author Jonathan Stokes described halicin, the first AI-discovered antibiotic, identified by a deep learning model trained on 2,500 molecules and shown to kill drug-resistant bacteria such as C. difficile, A. baumannii, and M. tuberculosis, with the discovery process completed in weeks rather than years. They later used machine learning to identify abaucin in 2023, a narrow-spectrum antibiotic effective against A. baumannii.