Student Késsia Souza Santos, from UEFS, is among the winners of the 23rd Highlight Award in Scientific and Technological Initiation of the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), in the Life Sciences area, Technological Initiation Scholar category. The work was supervised by professor Manoelito Coelho dos Santos Junior, coordinator of LMM.

The work

The project, entitled “Artificial intelligence, deep learning and incremental construction for the development of new chemical entities acting on Mycobacterium tuberculosis”, resulted in KAST (K-atalysticFlow). The software uses deep neural networks to recognize chemical patterns in compounds already proven active against the tuberculosis bacterium.

In a screening of about 695,000 natural products, the tool pointed to a promising candidate to inhibit the PKS13 enzyme. KAST is freely available on GitHub.

The ceremony

The awards ceremony was scheduled for August 10, 2026, at the opening of the 8th Working Meeting of Institutional Representatives and Coordinators of Scientific and Technological Initiation, at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP).

Learn more

• CNPq article about the project (in Portuguese)
• List of winners of the 23rd Highlight Award (in Portuguese)
• Conexão dos Saberes podcast (PROEXT-PG): episode about the award won by the UEFS Graduate Program in Pharmaceutical Sciences (in Portuguese)

Image: CNPq.