On Monday, 9 February 2026, the Faculty of Biology of the University of Bucharest invites you to the conference Exploring New Chemical Space for Antibiotics with Active Learning and Bacterial Phenotypic Profiling, delivered by PhD Professor Yves Brun, from the Département de microbiologie, infectiologie et immunologie, Université de Montréal (Canada).
The event will take place at 13:00, in the Conference Room of the Platform for Research on Systemic Biology and Ecology, Faculty of Biology, University of Bucharest (Splaiul Independenței 91-95, Bucharest).
About the conference
Antimicrobial resistance is a major global health threat, yet no antibiotics with a novel mode of action have been approved in the last 20 years. While machine learning (ML) accelerates drug discovery by optimizing molecules in known chemical spaces, it struggles to explore novel spaces where new mechanisms of action might exist. We use predictive and generative active learning ML to explore chemical space for antibiotic discovery. To enhance training, we employ bacterial cell painting, which uses fluorescent dyes to generate detailed phenotypic profiles of compound effects at high throughput. By linking these microscopy profiles to known antibiotics and whole genome CRISPRi depletion data, ML models can infer mechanisms of action. Using high-throughput microscopy screening and iterative active learning loops, we aim to identify and validate new antibiotic candidates in unexplored chemical spaces.
About the speaker
Dr. Yves Brun received his Ph.D. from Université Laval (1990) and conducted postdoctoral research with Lucy Shapiro at Stanford University on bacterial cell differentiation. After 26 years at Indiana University-Bloomington, where he was Distinguished Professor, he moved to the Université de Montréal in 2019 as the Canada 150 Research Chair in Bacterial Cell Biology. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Microbiology, the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences, the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences, and the Royal Society of Canada. He received a Fulbright Scholar Award and the Canadian Society of Microbiologists Murray award for career achievements. He has made important contributions to our understanding of key bacterial processes such as their 3D cellular organization, cell wall synthesis and morphology, surface adhesion and biofilm formation, and the biophysics of bacterial adhesives. He is Director of the PandemicStop-AI (pandemicstopai.com) consortium to accelerate the discovery of new antibiotics. More info about Professor Yves Brun is available here.
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