AI-written genomes bring medical promise and security risks
Elie Dolgin is a science writer specializing in biomedical research.
An electron microscopy reconstruction shows one of 16 functional bacteriophages designed using a genomic language model.
Sixteen viruses is not a large number. But the 16 bacteria-infecting virusesdescribed on 6 August inSciencewere no ordinary specimens.
They were not fished out of a sewage outflow or dug up from a soil sample, which is where such things normally come from. They were written by a genomic language model trained on vast troves of DNA sequences.Researchers atStanfordUniversity designed the small viruses from scratch, producing the first complete, functional genomes ever generated by AI.
And they worked. Delivered together as a cocktail, the designer viruses—known asbacteriophages, or phages—infectedE. colistrains that had already evolved resistance to the natural virus they were modeled on, something a comparable mix of natural phages could not do.
The advance offers a glimpse of a future in which bespoke phage therapies are made to order to combat bacterial infections that antibiotics can no longer touch.
Phage therapies have been used to treat infectious diseases for more than a century, but the field has struggled with a combination of biological and commercial hurdles: Individual phages often kill only a narrow range ofbacteria, resistance can evolve quickly, and naturally occurring phages can be difficult to patent.
AI-designed phages offer a way around some of those limitations—andBrian Hie, the Stanford computational biologist who led the new study, says collaborators have already begun asking to use their model to create phages capable of killing disease-causing bacteria, rather than targeting a laboratory strain ofE. coli.
But the same AI methods also lower the technical barrier to building other kinds of biological agents on demand, including viruses with the potential to cause disease, sharpening a long-standing worry that systems developed for medicine andbiotechnologycould be turned, without much modification, intobiological weapons.
“The question is no longer whether generative viralgenomedesign will exist,” a pair of biosecurity experts at theJohns Hopkins Center for Health Securitywrote in anaccompanying commentary. “It is whether society can build oversight that allows its benefits to unfold while preventing it from enabling serious harm.”
Inside the phrase “designed from scratch” sits a long engineering pipeline.