Antibiotic resistance is a "slow-coming tsunami like climate change", University of Newcastle Professor Pablo Moscato says.
Scientists have estimated that by 2050, 10 million lives a year and trillions of dollars of economic output will be at risk worldwide due to the rise of drug-resistant superbugs.
It will be a massive issue for human health and agriculture.
"Imagine if suddenly you have an antibiotic-resistant bacteria that eats crops," Professor Moscato said.
Professor Moscato, whose area of expertise is computer science and data, is working on the antibiotics problem.
He attended the First International Conference on Antimicrobial Computational Pharmacology in Melbourne in mid-December.
In efforts to create new drugs, research has already established certain molecules are toxic or non-toxic to humans but "we need to identify the substructures".
"If you want to design drugs in future based on artificial intelligence [AI] methods, you will need this as a basic building block," Professor Moscato said.
AI machines will need to know how to search for this information.
"We are trying to find an alternative method that can create patterns that can explain if the molecules are toxic or not. It is a process of continual refinement to discover what is toxic."
Professor Moscato compared the challenge of finding new drugs to combat bacteria to inventing a "missile that does not cause collateral damage".
That is, finding a drug that kills bacteria but is not toxic to humans.
"That's a difficult thing."
Part of the problem is that Big Pharma - also known as the pharmaceutical industry - doesn't have the profit motive to invest in new drugs to destroy bacteria.
"People want to have a pill for five days to get rid of the bugs, like we do with penicillin," he said.
"The problem is that some bacteria become resistant to antibiotics, yet people would still like to pay $20 to $30 for antibiotics. They don't want to pay what a cancer drug can cost, such as $5000 a month."
He said it could take pharmaceutical corporations 25 years to cover the cost of investing in the new drugs that are needed.
"After those 25 years, the drugs become available as a generic medicine," he said.
He said legislation could be changed so companies can invest and have the patent for such drugs for 50 years.
But more investment is needed from other sources, too.
"If we don't have the government, donors and philanthropy involved in this, then we are going to have a problem," he said.
