A robot scientist found malaria's enemy in toothpaste

Researchers working with Eve, a robot scientist built at the Universities of Cambridge, Manchester and Aberystwyth, let the machine design and run its own drug-screening experiments, using yeast engineered to depend on the parasite's enzymes, without a person choosing each test by hand.

Eve flagged triclosan, an antibacterial ingredient once common in toothpaste. Follow-up experiments showed it blocks an enzyme called DHFR in malaria parasites, the same target as an older antimalarial drug that parasites have grown resistant to across much of Africa.

Triclosan also blocked the resistant form of the enzyme, so it may still work against parasites already resistant to the older drug, though the finding came from lab experiments, not animals or people, and no malaria clinical trial has followed. The larger result was a robot running its own hypothesis-and-experiment cycle with no person choosing which compound to test next.

A toothpaste ingredient, found by a robot's own experiment.