de la Fuente Lab needed a faster, less trial-and-error way to discover antibiotic candidates against antimicrobial resistance because traditional molecule hunting can take years and requires difficult computational work across multiple scientific disciplines.
Reported impact
The lab dramatically accelerated candidate discovery, enabled more non-programmers to participate in computational biology, and increased confidence that AI-assisted research can uncover life-saving antibiotic molecules.
de la Fuente Lab uses ChatGPT and Codex as an AI-assisted discovery environment for antimicrobial research. The team treats DNA and molecular biology as code, feeds discovery questions and experimental ideas into ChatGPT, and uses the model to help formulate algorithms that can search complex biological systems for promising antibiotic candidates. Codex then turns those ideas into scripts, plotting routines, and computational biology workflows that chemists, biologists, and engineers across the lab can actually run. Candidate molecules move from AI-assisted analysis into wet-lab synthesis and testing, creating a loop where computational suggestions inform experiments and lab results shape the next search. This setup lets the lab work at digital speed, shortens the path from hypothesis to candidate discovery, and broadens who can contribute to computational biology inside the team.
Researchers frame molecular discovery problems in ChatGPT, turn promising approaches into code with Codex, run those workflows across biological data and molecular structures, and then pass the resulting candidates into wet-lab testing to validate which molecules can kill pathogens.
ChatGPT has become an essential part of the de la Fuente Lab's workflow. It has become the lab's communal brain
People that five years ago would have never touched a computer other than to analyze data are now able to do computational biology
Tools like ChatGPT and Codex are enabling Dr. Cesar de la Fuente and team to take a novel, and faster, approach to identifying new molecules
We can now discover new antibiotic molecules in a few hours instead of in five or six years
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Traceability
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The contact page lists the mailing address as "3610 Hamilton Walk ... Philadelphia, PA 19104," supporting a United States headquarters region.
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