If one genomics expert is to be believed, the field of biology just had “its Wright Brothers moment.”
Driving the news: For the first time ever, an AI model has created viruses that don’t exist in nature. The revelation was unveiled in a paper published in Science, where researchers detailed how they used a program called Evo to design and make 16 novel bacteriophages.
Bacteriophages are commonly occurring viruses that only target and kill bacteria.
Zoom in: Evo works a lot like a traditional large-language model, but instead of analyzing reams of text to learn predictive patterns, it's trained on genetic sequences. Eventually, it got good enough at predicting genome sequences that researchers felt it could generate its own.
Why it matters: There’s a lot of work to be done in this field — it’s worth noting that almost all of Evo’s viruses failed and the ones that it created are fairly close to existing ones — but the effects of this breakthrough could be massive for testing vaccines and antiviral drugs.
In particular, it could revolutionize phage therapy, in which bacteriophages are identified — and often modified — to target a specific harmful bacterium.
Yes, but: And boy, is this a big yes, but: the development poses a frightening biosecurity risk. The thought of a bad actor using the tech to create an untreatable virus is chilling. Still, the researchers believe the potential good outweighs the harm, and have kept Evo open source.—QH
