Aided by AI, New Catheter Design Prevents Bacterial Infections

An interdisciplinary project at Caltech has designed a new type of catheter tube that impedes the upstream mobility of bacteria, without the need for antibiotics or other chemical antimicrobial methods. With the new design, which was optimized by novel artificial intelligence (AI) technology, the number of bacteria that are able to swim upstream in laboratory experiments was reduced 100-fold.

A paper describing the study appears in the journal Science Advances on January 3. The work was a collaboration between the laboratories of Chiara Daraio, G. Bradford Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Physics and Heritage Medical Research Institute Investigator; Paul Sternberg, Bren Professor of Biology; John Brady, Chevron Professor of Chemical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering; and Anima Anandkumar, Bren Professor of Computing and Mathematical Sciences. [Caltech story]