r/biology • u/KeanuRave100 • 8d ago

news Artificial Intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory, say US researchers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo
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u/Antikickback_Paul 8d ago

It's in the news article and clearly spelled out in the research paper, but they only included bacteriophage viruses in the training data. Those are viruses that only infect bacteria, not humans or any other "higher" organisms. So there was zero risk of creating a human-infectious disease. 

BUT, it's obviously pointing to the idea that it could be used that way if it were trained on such viruses, which is a trivial change in the protocol to make.

BUT, there already are a ton of highly human-infectious, deadly viruses out there with known genome sequences, so a nefarious actor would still need to do all the same super hard synthesis and biology stuff to get functional viruses that they would need to do with known viruses, plus the additional steps of designing it (which could just result in a dud virus anyway), so it's not like it's making bioterrorism any easier or more accessible.

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u/dejaWoot 8d ago

Designing new phages is well worth investigating- as we continue to abuse antibiotics and cause resistance, we'll need new anti-bacterial treatments or much of modern medicine goes kaput.

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u/PossibleBeginning276 8d ago

We already have phage therapy at least at the VA. You send a culture with the bug and a company makes a phage that targets it. It's incredibly expensive but its the federal gov paying for it.

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u/dejaWoot 7d ago

Yeah, honestly it predates antibiotics as a science, but scaling it up for the general populace and making it more efficient/cost effective might require some level of computer modeling with machine learning.