Radical Numerics, a San Francisco biosecurity start-up, has launched an AI tool that can detect dangerous natural and artificially engineered viruses and bacteria using only a laptop and a small gene sequencer.
The tool, called Omnii Defense, works offline, so researchers can test genetic samples in the field without a reliable internet connection.
Eric Nguyen, the company's co-founder and chief executive, said biosecurity had fallen behind cybersecurity in using AI for defence.
"We felt that the biosecurity space was far behind on the defense side," he said.
Spotting the unknown
Existing tools, such as the government-funded Felix system, work by matching genetic sequences against libraries of known threats.
Omnii Defense instead predicts whether an organism is likely to cause disease, or has been artificially made, even if it has never been seen before.
It gives each sample a threat score between zero and one.
To test it, the company removed the Bundibugyo virus, which is behind an Ebola outbreak in East Africa, from the data used to train the model.
The tool still flagged 33% of related sequences as dangerous.
When the company removed the virus's entire family, it flagged 22%, compared with almost none for tools that do not use AI, according to Christine Parthemore, Radical's head of biodefence.
From Stanford to the clinic
Nguyen and his co-founders worked on Evo and Evo-2, free AI models trained on DNA, while studying for doctorates at Stanford University.
Omnii Defense is based on the company's Omnii model, which is trained on DNA, RNA, proteins and other genetic signals.
In October, Radical used Omnii to design bacteriophages, viruses that attack bacteria, to treat a patient with a drug-resistant E. coli infection under special permission from US regulators.
Tabula Bioscience also worked on that project, but Radical did not mention the partnership in its announcement.
George Church, the Harvard geneticist who advises both companies, resigned from Radical last week over the omission.
Access to Omnii Defense is limited to approved testers working with national laboratories and government agencies.
Read more
