Virology Latest dispatch
The US Department of War has awarded Flagship Pioneering up to $47 million to build AI platforms that predict viral evolution before outbreaks happen. Here's what the ONTARGET deal means for biosecurity, pandemic readiness and the AI-bio arms race.
Everything else from the field.
As world leaders gather at the UN for a High-Level Meeting on pandemics, a new AI-powered global infrastructure (the Pandemic Preparedness Engine and Global Pathogen Analysis Platform) is quietly being built to compress vaccine development from months to days.
A Nature feature published this week tracks how AI co-scientist platforms from Google DeepMind, FutureHouse and others are already generating validated hypotheses in real labs, and why human judgement is becoming the scarcest resource in science.
Alibaba's DAMO Academy has open-sourced RADAR, a Science-published AI that outperformed 23 of 26 radiologists reading abdominal CT scans for 146 conditions, free for any hospital to run.
Stanford's 37,000-agent Virtual Biotech mined 55,984 clinical trials and independently designed a lung cancer drug strategy Merck was already pursuing.
Novo Nordisk just added Anthropic's Claude Science to an AI drug discovery stack that already includes OpenAI. Here's what the deal reveals about AI in healthcare.
A new protein-language-model study claims to out-predict the WHO's flu vaccine picks, reviving a live dispute over whether AI truly beats expert judgement here.
A new Cell study pits 18 leading AI systems against ageing biology data. Small, specialised models beat every frontier system, and the whole toolkit is free to use.
Delphy reformulates Bayesian phylogenetics around explicit mutations and runs in a browser, cutting an H5N1 outbreak analysis from over 21 days to 42 minutes.
Five pharmaceutical companies fine-tuned OpenFold3 on 20,167 private protein–ligand structures without pooling the data. Protein–ligand accuracy jumped from 35.6% to 52.1%. Here is what that means for drug discovery, antiviral design and pandemic preparedness.
Anthropic's Dario Amodei asked rivals to slow AI development and let outside evaluators inside frontier labs. OpenAI and Google DeepMind agreed within days. Here's what's actually being tested, bioweapons risk included.
UK Biobank's Research Analysis Platform reopens this September after a data security incident, and a 2026 study shows why AI is quietly eroding old promises of genetic anonymity.
Anthropic's September 2026 threat report reveals Claude was used in five bioweapons-adjacent research attempts, including a chikungunya gain-of-function request. Here's why virologists and AI safety experts are both worried.
UC Berkeley's GPN-Star, a genomic language model published in Nature, predicts harmful DNA variants better than far larger AI models, and trains in hours not months.
An AI-discovered, AI-designed drug lowered predicted biological age across six independent ageing clocks in a phase 2a trial. What it means, and what it doesn't.
For the first time in an Ebola response, WHO and Flowminder are using anonymised mobile-phone data and modelling to predict where Congo's Bundibugyo outbreak will spread next. An early test called all ten hotspots. Here is what it means for pandemic preparedness.
Google DeepMind's AlphaGenome Atlas precomputes the molecular effects of all 9 billion single-letter human DNA changes and offers them free in a browser. What it does, why it matters, and where it falls short.
Stanford's SPHERE turns locked biomedical datasets into shareable 'synthetic twins' for AI, and opens an Alzheimer's cohort to prove it. The promise, and the caveats.
OpenEvidence's Darwin is the first medical AI to score 100% on MedQA, yet the company is withholding it over biosecurity risk. The claim, and its caveats.
AI in 2026 is moving past ageing clocks that spit out a single number towards foundation models that reason about biological age, predict disease and nominate targets. Here is what changed and why it matters.
