Learning and forecasting shared evolutionary pathways to multi-drug resistance across global pathogens
Journal:
bioRxiv
Published Date:
Sep 1, 2026
Abstract
Infections with bacteria which have evolved multi-drug resistance (MDR) cause millions of deaths worldwide. Large-scale efforts are gathering genotypic and phenotypic data on MDR bacteria, but methods for learning the structure, diversity, and predictors of evolutionary pathways to MDR have yet to take full advantage of these data. Here, we use evolutionary accumulation modelling (EvAM), an emerging class of machine learning methods with roots in cancer progression, to infer these evolutionary pathways across ESKAPEE pathogens (seven bacterial species that dominate health burdens), using a database of over 635k genotyped phenotypic observations from around the world. We identify global patterns in MDR evolutionary pathways, remarkably shared across multiple ESKAPEE species. Species-specific deviations from these stereotypical pathways are connected with geographical and demographic covariates, facilitating predictions of future MDR evolution. We verify these predictions with several hundred new phenotypes from ESKAPEE samples spanning decades of clinical infections in sub-Saharan Africa, demonstrating the capacity to forecast future MDR evolution from these inferred shared pathways.
