Virology Latest dispatch
Scientists mutated every letter of the ΦX174 phage genome and measured the result. Top AI models predicted it only moderately well, a reality check for AI biology.
Everything else from the field.
A Johns Hopkins team built an AI agent that screened 201,064 studies for a suicide-prevention meta-analysis, cutting human workload by 99% at under half a cent per paper. Here is what the preprint actually shows, and where it falls short.
Google Research has released the planetary prediction engine, an AI agent that builds geospatial models from a plain-language question. It was tested on a live Ebola outbreak. Here is what the numbers actually show, and what they do not.
The first blinded, wet-lab-validated benchmark for AI antibody design just landed in Nature Biotechnology. Here is what the models got right, and wrong.
A new bioRxiv preprint, Prot-LAMBDA, teaches protein language models explicit 3D geometry and reportedly matches a model five times its size. Why efficiency, not scale, is the real story.
A Nature Medicine study trained AI on 25,712 human tissue slides and found that organs keep separate biological clocks. Some of that signal shows up in a blood sample. What it means, and what it does not.
The EU's science service studied 480 biological AI models and found a gap between scientific brilliance and real-world readiness. Here's what the JRC report says and why it matters.
GenBio AI's AIDO Cell is a 'world model' that simulates a human cell across scales, from DNA to shape. Here's what it does, why it matters, and what still needs proving.
As Congo's Bundibugyo Ebola outbreak hits record size, an AI-assisted model estimates the true toll may be up to triple the confirmed count.
RAND says no single safeguard can stop AI-assisted bioweapons, and lays out nine layered defences. Here is what the report argues, why it lands now, and where it is still guesswork.
A new Science Advances study uses a protein language model to annotate enzyme 'dark matter' in the gut microbiome, mapping metabolism in health and inflammatory bowel disease.
Anthropic published a wet-lab-validated protein binder result on 18 August 2026, then disclosed an 11-month biosecurity classifier gap. The two stories together explain why the world's most capable protein designer is also the one most locked out of virology.
A preprint posted on 3 August 2026 teaches robots to read wet-lab protocols and act on them. Benchmarks published weeks earlier show why containment labs are still out of reach.
A Nature Methods paper borrows the alignment method used to tune chatbots and applies it to protein design, producing a heat-stable H5N1 hemagglutinin with only 45 tries.
A new preprint tests whether computational and AI forecasting models could have predicted the 2026 Bundibugyo Ebola epidemic in DR Congo before it became one of the largest on record. Here is what the models got right, what they missed, and why it matters for outbreak science.
Genentech validated the first AI-discovered neuroscience drug target from its $12B Recursion partnership. A proof point the AI-drug discovery field needed.
The August 2026 American Journal of Bioethics issue confronts AI agents moving into clinical and research operations, and asks an uncomfortable question: what happens when those same agents start doing the work of bioethicists?
On 5 August 2026, the FDA approved Moderna's mFLUSIVA, the first mRNA seasonal flu vaccine. The decision is small in label and large in consequence, because the same platform that produced COVID-19 shots in months can now be redirected to a pandemic influenza strain in weeks.
Jennifer Doudna's lab used an AI protein-design model to build a synthetic gene-editing enzyme, SynTnpB, that edits human cells nearly twice as efficiently as the natural version. Here is what the Science paper actually shows, and what it does not.
Biohub's open-source ESM models learned the rules of protein biology from evolution alone — and designed working drug binders in days. Here's what the release means, and where it falls short.
