OpenAI: Codex and ChatGPT help hunt antimicrobial candidates

10 Sep 2026: OpenAI published how César de la Fuente’s lab uses Codex and ChatGPT — plus its own deep-learning models — to search living and extinct genomes for antimicrobial candidates. Company post; candidates are early discovery, not approved drugs.

10 Sep 2026: OpenAI published the Applied AI story “How a researcher uses Codex and ChatGPT to search for new antimicrobial molecules.” That dated company page is the filing event.

OpenAI profiles César de la Fuente’s lab, which it says searches the genomes of living and extinct organisms for molecules that could help fight drug-resistant infections. De la Fuente is quoted on the page calling antimicrobial resistance “one of the greatest existential threats to humanity in my opinion,” and saying there has not been a new class of antibiotics for 50 years. Those are his comments as published by OpenAI.

OpenAI’s page cites about five million deaths in 2021 associated with bacterial antimicrobial resistance, with that annual toll projected to roughly double by 2050, linking The Lancet. Those are figures on OpenAI’s post — not desk-verified epidemiology.

OpenAI says it can take years to find molecules with the potential to become antimicrobials. On the same page, the lab’s own deep-learning models — trained to recognize patterns in biological sequences and to search genome and protein datasets — can reduce that initial candidate search from years to hours. Treat the speed-up as company/lab framing, not an independent bench.

Alongside those models, OpenAI says the lab uses ChatGPT and Codex to brainstorm hypotheses, write and refine code, process datasets, analyze results, and bridge gaps across biology, chemistry, and computer science. De la Fuente, on the page: ChatGPT is a collaborative workspace that receives input from people who think differently about the problems; “you have to always double-check for accuracy.”

A candidate is not an approved drug. OpenAI’s page walks the remaining path: confirm the molecule kills the target microbe; dose; effects on human cells; chemical optimization; toxicity; how readily microbes develop resistance; how the candidate moves through the body; a reliable way to manufacture it; then regulatory review and clinical trials. De la Fuente, quoted: “Ground-truth experiments are essential to validate AI predictions.” This filing does not name molecules, trial results, FDA approvals, or product SKUs beyond Codex and ChatGPT as described.

A primary OpenAI Applied AI filing showing frontier coding/chat tools inside real antimicrobial discovery — keep the line clear between genome search speed-ups and medicines that still must survive the lab and clinic.