Jonathan Stokes

MIT

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The Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS) is a community for entrepreneurs and researchers who accelerate the science and applications of AI technology. We’ve been running for 6 years now and have hosted over fifty entrepreneurs and academics who have built billion-dollar companies and published foundational papers that drive the AI field forward. 

In the lead up to our 6th annual event that will be broadcast live online on the 26th June 2020, we’re running a series of speaker profiles highlighting what you can expect to learn on the day!

Biology as a data-driven science

Drug discovery and development is an incredibly important yet capital intensive, lengthy and low efficiency process. In recent years, biology and chemistry has become increasingly high-throughput and data-driven thanks to massively parallel sequencing, robotic liquid handling robots, advanced imaging techniques and more.

This has opened up the opportunity for machine learning techniques to not only improve experimental analysis but also to generate novel experimental hypotheses that are worth testing. For example, machine learning models can be used in virtual screens where they generate candidate molecules that are likely to have a desired phenotypic effect. While the number of virtual screens is increasing, there are fewer studies that close the loop with empirical results.

A deep learning approach to antibiotics discovery: Welcome, Jonathan!

At RAAIS 2020, we’re excited to be hosting Jonathan Stokes who is a Banting Fellow under the supervision of James Collins at MIT. Jonathan received his BHSc in 2011, graduating summa cum laude, and his PhD in antimicrobial chemical biology in 2016, both from McMaster University. His research applies a combination of chemical biology and machine learning to develop novel antibacterial therapies with expanded capabilities over conventional antibiotics. Jonathan is the recipient of many awards, including the Canadian Institutes of Health Research Master’s Award, the Colin James Lyne Lock Doctoral Award, and was ranked first of just 23 elite postdoctoral scholars to be awarded the prestigious Banting Fellowship.

Most recently, Jonathan published a first author Cell paper on a deep learning approach to antibiotics discovery. The paper is both fascinating and impactful. Firstly, there have been no new antibiotic scaffold discoveries in 20+ years despite the hugely pressing that we have for antibiotics. It is projected that deaths attributable to resistant infections will reach 10 million per year by 2050. Second, this study shows how a trained deep neural network can predict antibiotic activity in molecules that are structurally different from known antibiotics, among which Halicin exhibits efficacy against broad-spectrum bacterial infections in mice.

To find out more about Jonathan’s work, check out his Google scholar and follow him on Twitter.

We’re excited to be hosting Jonathan at RAAIS 2020, welcome!