AI-Crafted Viruses Have Arrived and Are Effectively Eliminating Bacteria
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“That was pretty striking, just actually seeing, like, this AI-generated sphere,” says Brian Hie, who leads the lab at the Arc Institute where the work was carried out. Overall, 16 of the 302 designs ended up working—that is, the computer-designed phage started to replicate, eventually bursting through the bacteria and killing it. J. Craig Venter, who created some of the first organisms with lab-made DNA nearly two decades ago, says the AI methods look to him like “just a faster version of trial-and-error experiments.” For instance, when a team he led managed to create a bacterium with a lab-printed genome in 2008, it was after a long hit-or-miss process of testing out different genes. “We did the manual AI version, combing through the literature, taking what was known,” he says.
But speed is exactly why many believe AI will transform biology. The new methods already claimed a Nobel Prize in 2024 for predicting protein shapes. Additionally, significant investments are being made in the potential for AI to discover new drugs. This week, a Boston company raised $235 million to build automated labs driven by artificial intelligence. Computer-designed viruses could also have various applications. For instance, doctors have sometimes tried “phage therapy” to treat patients with serious bacterial infections, and similar tests are underway to cure cabbage of black rot, also caused by bacteria. “There is definitely a lot of potential for this technology,” says Samuel King, the student who spearheaded the project in Hie’s lab. He notes that most gene therapy works using viruses to shuttle genes into patients’ bodies, and AI might develop more effective ones. The Stanford team says they purposely haven’t taught their AI about viruses that can infect people. However, this type of technology does create the risk that other scientists—out of curiosity, good intentions, or malice—could turn the methods on human pathogens, exploring new dimensions of lethality.
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