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

MIT professors Regina Barzilay and James Collins have received the 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence, MIT News reported on November 2. The award, created in 2024 by the University of Chicago in partnership with Caltech, honors contributions that jointly advance AI and the natural sciences or engineering. The two, faculty co-leads of MIT's Jameel Clinic, were recognized for combining deep learning, bioengineering and lab validation to find antibacterial candidates against drug-resistant pathogens.

Their best-known result came in a 2020 paper in Cell, with then-postdoc Jonathan Stokes as first author. It described halicin, which MIT calls the first AI-discovered antibiotic. A deep learning model trained on 2,500 molecules flagged the compound, originally studied as a possible diabetes drug, and tests showed it killed resistant bacteria including Clostridium difficile, Acinetobacter baumannii and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. According to MIT, a process that once took years was finished in a few weeks.

In 2023 the team and Stokes, now at McMaster University, used machine learning to identify abaucin, a narrow-spectrum antibiotic aimed at A. baumannii. Its focus on one species is meant to reduce the chance of resistance developing and spare helpful gut bacteria.

The prize highlights AI's growing role against antimicrobial resistance. Collins says generative AI is turning the technology from a discovery aid into a design tool, while Barzilay cautions that drug discovery remains at an early stage, with only parts of the pipeline automated and realistic AI models of human biology still needed.