César de la Fuente

César de la Fuente is a Presidential Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and among the youngest tenured professors in the history of Penn Medicine. He serves as director of the Machine Biology Group at Penn and holds a distinguished early-career position at the institution. De la Fuente completed postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and earned a doctorate from the University of British Columbia. He holds appointments in psychiatry, microbiology, chemical and biomolecular engineering, and bioengineering across Penn's Perelman School of Medicine and School of Engineering and Applied Science.

De la Fuente's research focuses on leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to accelerate discovery in biology and medicine. He pioneered the development of the first computer-designed antibiotic with efficacy in animal models, helping establish AI-driven antibiotic discovery as an emerging field. His work integrates principles from synthetic biology, chemistry, and microbiology to develop antibiotics using computational approaches. His lab has developed methods to mine biological information, enabling the identification of more than 1 million antimicrobial compounds and reframing the human body as a systematic source of antibiotics. This research has significantly increased the speed of antibiotic discovery, reducing processes that once took decades to just hours.

De la Fuente's lab has advanced antibiotic discovery by applying machine learning to explore the proteomes of extinct organisms, including Neanderthals and Denisovans, to identify potential new antibiotics. This work launched the field of molecular de-extinction and introduced a new framework for drug discovery. The approach has yielded preclinical antibiotic candidates such as neanderthalin, mammuthusin, and elephasin. Additional innovations from his lab include reprogramming venoms into antimicrobials, developing autonomous nanorobots to treat infections, creating resistance-proof antimicrobial materials, and inventing rapid, low-cost diagnostic devices for COVID-19 and other infections.

De la Fuente has received more than 80 national and international awards. He is an elected fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering and was recognized by MIT Technology Review as one of the world's top innovators for work on digitizing evolution to improve antibiotics. His honors include the Princess of Girona Prize, the ASM Awards for Early Career Applied and Biotechnological Research and for Early Career Basic Research, the Fleming Prize, selection as a National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leader in Health and Medicine, the Sloan Fellowship, and selection by the World Economic Forum to the Young Global Leaders Class. He was also elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Biology. De la Fuente has been named a Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher multiple times, placing him among the top 1 percent of cited researchers globally, and received an honorary doctorate from the University of Leon at age 39.

He has co-authored a book on machine learning for drug discovery, secured multiple patents, and published around 200 peer-reviewed papers in journals including "Cell," "Science," "Cell Host & Microbe," "Nature Biomedical Engineering," "Nature Microbiology," "Nature Communications," and "PNAS." De la Fuente has delivered around 400 invited lectures, including keynote and named lectures, and has spoken at TEDx. He serves on the editorial boards of numerous scholarly journals and is an associate editor of "Drug Resistance Updates," "Nature Communications Biology," "Bioactive Materials," "Bioengineering & Translational Medicine," and "Digital Discovery." With antimicrobial resistance projected to claim millions of lives annually in the coming decades, de la Fuente's work addresses a critical frontier in modern medicine and contributes to public discourse across academia and industry.