A team of young researchers from Bocconi’s Department of Computing Sciences — Sebastiano Ariosto, Marco Benedetti, Geri Skenderi, and Davide Straziota — took first place in the inaugural Phagos × AWS Hackdays 2025, an international hackathon dedicated to AI-driven solutions for antibiotic resistance.

The Bocconi team chose to tackle one of the most ambitious challenges: predicting which specific types of phages are capable of infecting certain bacterial strains. Being able to accurately predict these interactions is essential for developing safe and effective therapies, avoiding the use of incompatible viruses that might be ineffective or even harmful. Competing alongside participants from around the world, they developed an innovative approach in just 36 hours, combining Deep Learning and Large Language Models (LLMs) to analyze complex biological data through an original and highly interpretable approach. 

Their solution stood out for its originality and potential impact in the fight against antibiotic-resistant infections, particularly in livestock farming.