On July 15, 2026, the science news portal PCR.NEWS published an article “Halicin is active against the causative agent of tuberculosis, but there are issues about its stability”. It reports on a new paper by Dr. Igor Mokrousov, Head of the Laboratory of Molecular Epidemiology and Evolutionary Genetics, and his coauthors in the International Journal of Antimicrobial Agents (Elsevier).
Halicin is a unique compound selected by the artificial intelligence system as a broad-spectrum antimicrobial drug. A new in vitro study of Russian clinical strains of Mycobacterium tuberculosis revealed significant bactericidal activity of halicin, but also uncovered puzzling stability issues. “In fact, halicin kills faster than the microbe can select for beneficial resistance mutations in both targets, and before the compound itself becomes inactive,“ Igor Mokrousov says.