[University of Massachusetts Amherst] Fighting the World’s Deadliest Infection with PAC-MAN and AI

6 July 2026

University of Massachusetts Amherst news release

TB, caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb), is the world’s deadliest single-agent caused infection, responsible for 1.23 million deaths in 2024, according to the World Health Organization. The bacterium’s unique outer cell membrane is notoriously hard to penetrate, making few drugs, including antibiotics, effective in treating the disease. However, a research team led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst has developed a pair of techniques that can vastly speed up the search for better TB drugs.

Published in the journal Nature Microbiology, the team’s approaches first measure which chemical compounds are able to slip across the outer membrane and then use those measurements to predict other compounds that can get into the Mtb cell.

Read the full news release here.

Source: University of Massachusetts Amherst