AI has been used to design new viruses that can replicate in the lab, in what researchers say is the first successful AI design of complete genomes.
It is the first time whole genomes have been successfully designed using artificial intelligence.
The 16 new viruses were created to infect bacteria and were reported to pose no threat to people.
Researchers at Stanford University said the work marked a “very significant turning point” that could eventually lead to new ways of treating disease, although experts have also raised urgent safety and security concerns.
AI tools are developing rapidly and have already been used to design new antibiotics.
Designing a viable virus from scratch is considerably more complex.
Brian Hie, assistant professor at Stanford University, told the BBC: “This is a next step in the complexity that’s designable by generative AI, this is the first time generative AI has been used to design a complete genome, it’s something that can replicate and have other functions inside cells… this was new territory for us.”
The technology works in a similar way to large language models such as ChatGPT, which predict sequences of text.
The AI models, called Evo1 and Evo2, instead predict sequences of genetic code.
They were trained on genetic codes from viruses, bacteria, plants and people.
The models were then refined to produce bacteriophages, viruses that infect specific species of bacteria.
The researchers selected the most promising 302 AI-generated designs and produced them in the laboratory. Of these, 16 successfully killed E. coli bacteria.
Samuel King, a PhD student in the laboratory, said the team realised the phages were working in the early hours of the morning.
The viruses had been placed on petri dishes containing a layer of bacteria while researchers waited for signs that they were working.
King said: “We were starting to see these clear spots and it was just extremely exciting.”
Developing new phages could lead to treatments for infections that have become resistant to antibiotics.
Phage therapy uses viruses that infect bacteria as a possible way to tackle infections that no longer respond to antibiotics.
The work also points towards AI being used to design biology beyond what occurs naturally, an area known as synthetic biology.
But concerns have also been raised that the same technology could be misused to create new diseases.
Dr Thomas Inglesby and Dr Moritz Hanke from the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University said the findings raised ‘urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions.’
The researchers took several precautions.
Viruses that could infect complex organisms were excluded from the training database, the work focused on bacteriophages rather than viruses that infect people and the experiments took place in a secure laboratory.
