Neanderthals disappeared around 40,000 years ago. Some of their molecular sequences remained recoverable, waiting for someone to understand where and how to look. @delafuentelab Cesar de la Fuente and the Machine Biology Group at the University of Pennsylvania developed a machine-learning framework to search the proteomes of Neanderthals and Denisovans for hidden antimicrobial peptides. The most promising candidates were then recreated in the laboratory and tested against modern bacteria. Some demonstrated antibacterial activity both in vitro and in mice. De la Fuente calls this new field molecular de-extinction. What fascinated me was not the Jurassic Park image of bringing something extinct back to life. It was the reversal of perspective. We usually imagine artificial intelligence as a machine that accelerates the future. Here, AI becomes a machine for exploring the past, recovering biological possibilities that evolution created and living organisms no longer encode. At a time when antibiotic resistance is associated with millions of deaths worldwide, this is more than an ingenious scientific experiment. It opens an entirely new place in which to search for medicines. I chose César de la Fuente’s work for the first episode of DigitMondo | International Edition, the new English-language edition of my podcast. The episode is called: 🎧 The Neanderthal Antibiotic: AI and Medicine from Extinct Species Thank you, César, for giving us a radically new way to think about where the medicines of the future might come from. Listen here 🇬🇧 : open.spotify.com/episode/6oH… #MolecularDeExtinction #AntibioticResistance #ArtificialIntelligence #DigitMondo