About five million deaths in 2021 were associated specifically with bacterial antimicrobial resistance — and a researcher is now using Codex and ChatGPT to mine the genomes of extinct species for the molecules that could fight back.
The Breakthrough: AI as an Antimicrobial Discovery Engine
César de la Fuente's lab has turned AI into a molecular archaeologist. Using OpenAI's Codex and ChatGPT, his team scans both living and extinct genomes — think extinct as well as living species — searching for peptide sequences that could kill drug-resistant pathogens.
This isn't speculative. The lab uses this approach to prioritise the most promising candidate molecules, though each still needs lab validation before it could become a real medicine. The AI doesn't just search; it recognises patterns in biological sequences that help prioritise the most promising candidates — work that can otherwise take years, though lab validation is still essential before any candidate becomes a real medicine.
Why Codex and ChatGPT — Not Just a Specialist Biotech Tool?
De la Fuente's team uses ChatGPT and Codex together, alongside its own specialised AI models, to brainstorm hypotheses, write and refine code, process datasets, and analyse results.
This is a good example of using general-purpose AI tools, alongside specialised ones, in serious scientific work. The lab combines its own specialised AI models with ChatGPT and Codex, showing how general-purpose tools can support even highly specialised science.
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What This Means for Learners
This story is a vivid proof point that AI literacy is now a hard scientific skill, not a soft one. A researcher who knows how to prompt Codex to write genomic search scripts — and how to use ChatGPT to interrogate the output — has a research superpower that didn't exist five years ago.
You don't need to be a biologist to take the lesson. The pattern here — use ChatGPT and Codex together, alongside specialised models, to move faster through hypothesis, code, and analysis — applies to finance, law, journalism, and beyond. Learning to orchestrate AI tools in sequence is the skill of this decade.
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