Would you let an AI-designed virus be injected in your body? Well, at least one individual just did, according to the company behind it.
AI bioscience startup Radical Numerics released a report this week saying a patient received a treatment containing an AI-designed virus. Radical Numerics says this is the first treatment of its kind.
The type of virus that Radical Numerics' AI model, called Omnii-1, created is called a phage, which isn't a new type of virus. Phage therapy is an existing experimental treatment where doctors administer viruses that attack bacteria to a person with a serious bacterial infection. The idea is to kill the bacteria causing the infection without infecting human cells.
Radical Numerics' AI model did design this specific phage to combat the patient's particular bacterial infection, and that AI-created phage was just administered to a person — which is a first.
However, as the New York Times reports, there are some questionable aspects of this trial.
For example, we don't yet know how the trial went. While the trial is ongoing, Radical Numerics won't provide information about the patient or the doctors involved. What's more, Radical Numerics' report wasn't peer-reviewed or published in a scientific journal. Instead, the company simply posted the paper on its website — the same way any company might publish a news update or blog post.
The company's CEO, Eric Nguyen, said the team plans to share more details once they receive consent from the patient. He cited confidentiality agreements as the reason Radical Numerics can't disclose more information at this time.
We might be waiting a while to find out whether the treatment worked. While phage therapy can last anywhere from a couple of days to a few weeks, doctors also have to monitor the patient for months afterward to make sure the infection was actually cured and won't come back.