Sixteen viruses is not a large number. But the 16 bacteria-infecting viruses described on 6 August in Science were 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 at Stanford University 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 as bacteriophages, or phages—infected E. coli strains 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.
