MIT Researchers Win Pritzker Prize for AI

MIT professors Regina Barzilay and Jim Collins receive the 2026 Pritzker Prize for AI in Science Research Excellence. Their work used deep learning to identify halicin in 2020 and abaucin in 2023. The team trained a model on 2,500 molecules to find these novel antibiotics against drug-resistant pathogens like Clostridium difficile and Mycobacterium tuberculosis.