Pharma and AI Partnering to Drive New Era in Antibiotic Development

This is a short series addressing how AI can help in antimicrobial discovery including how the field has moved from a predictive to a generative process, looking at one partnership between a pharmaceutical company and an AI biotech social venture, and how these partnerships may help in reducing antimicrobial resistance.

A new partnership between Phare Bio, an AI social venture, and Basilea Pharmaceuticals is highlighting how artificial intelligence is reshaping not only scientific discovery but also the way pharmaceutical collaborations operate. By aligning early-stage AI-driven discovery with late-stage clinical expertise, this collaboration aims to accelerate the development of antibiotics.

The partnership emerged from years of informal discussions, during which both organizations recognized a strong complementarity in their capabilities. At the core of the partnership is a shared effort to define a “target product profile” before any compounds are developed. This approach prioritizes both clinical need and commercial viability—2 factors critical to ensuring that new antibiotics reach patients. In this case, the partners are focusing on broad-spectrum antibiotics targeting Gram-negative bacteria, an area of significant unmet medical need.

Instead of developing antibiotics around existing compounds, Phare and Basilea are using AI models trained on specific drug characteristics, such as efficacy, delivery method, and half-life, to generate entirely new candidates tailored to real-world requirements.

“Because AI is getting closer to that idea of some bespoke indication targeting engine, we can now bring our partners to the forefront of the process…And using those drug-like parameters, we can now suggest to the model that we don't just want to have let's say a compound targeting MRSA…. as a hypothetical example, you can actually train the model on those specific parameters and get to that target product profile,” said Phare Bio CEO and Co-founder Akhila Kosaraju, MD.

Once AI-generated compounds meet predefined benchmarks, Phare Bio advances them through early validation. From there, Basilea takes over, applying its expertise to push promising candidates through development stages and into clinical trials.

This collaboration is in its infancy stage having made the announcement of their partnership just a few months ago. Long-term, Kosaraju says the partnership is like a relay race, where Phare will hand off the AI-generated compounds to Basilea who can take over much like a runner getting a baton from a teammate.

Not only are they taking a novel approach in how drug development is done but they are doing something uniquely on the business side as well.

“I think that this is an indication that AI is not just revolutionizing the technology, of course, in the science, but also revolutionizing the business of how we conduct partnerships, and codevelopment across the field,” Kosaraju said.

In the final episode of the series, Kosaraju will talk about how their partnership looks to address multidrug resistance.