oracle biofy partnership shown by Close-up of two lab technicians working on antibiotics. They're looking at the camera. One of the technicians is wearing a lab coat with an Oracle logo, the other has a Biofy logo.
Oracle and Biofy are joining forces in the fight against antibiotic-resistant bacteria (image: Google ImageFX)

Oracle and Biofy deal uses AI to speed up antibacterial resistance discoveries

Brazilian life-sciences tech firm Biofy is using Oracle infrastructure to slash the time it spends processing antibiotic-resistance data, enabling the company to cut the time it takes to identify resistance from days to hours.

Antibiotics are not one-size-fits all: each antibiotic has a slightly different way of working that means it can kill – or slow the growth of – particular types of bacteria.

Some bacteria and viruses have evolved mechanisms that make them resistant to drugs that were traditionally used to treat them. Antimicrobial resistance is considered one of the chief threats to human health, according to the World Health Organisation and is thought to kill over a million people a year globally – a figure that could rise to 10 million by 2050.

Biofy’s tech uses AI to sequence the genetic signatures of bacteria and identify which antibiotics they are resistant to, and which can be used to treat the infection they cause, using data gleaned from studying the genetic make-up of over 720,000 microorganisms.

How Oracle is helping Biofy

Using Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has enabled Biofy to speed up the analysis of bacteria’s DNA profiles: the process previously took five days and now takes under four hours, according to Oracle.

Biofy has also been able to improve performance by 50%, Oracle added, but did not detail which metrics were used.

Previously, Biofy had been running its own on-premises infrastructure, which didn’t offer the scalability and processing power the company needed. it now uses several OCI services, including Oracle Autonomous Databases to store data on bacterial DNA, and Oracle AI Vector Search to pick out patterns in the genetic material that can help in mapping bacteria to a particular microbial family. Biofy has also deployed OCI Compute and Cache, to improve processing time and cut latency.

Biofy uses Nanopore MinION tech to sequence bacterial DNA, and its machine-learning based Abby Recommender then identifies genes that suggest a bacterium has acquired resistance to particular antibiotics. It can then recommend which drugs the bacteria is likely to be susceptible to.

Late last year, the company said its bacteria genetic-sequencing technology was being piloted in six labs and one hospital. 

Jo Best
Jo Best

Jo has been writing about technology for over 20 years, and has always been fascinated by emerging technologies and innovation. These days, she's particularly interested in the intersection of technology, science, and human health.