When it comes to using artificial intelligence to design new drugs, the rules are simple: therapeutic activity is rewarded while toxicity is penalised.
But what happens if the rule is flipped, so that toxicity is rewarded? Those same computational techniques, it turns out, can be repurposed to design potential biochemical weapons. AI-designed drugs now have a dark side: AI-designed toxins.
The unmasking of intelligent drug design as a dual-use technology — obvious in hindsight — was done by a team working at Collaborations Pharmaceuticals, a company in North Carolina. The company uses machine learning to identify drugs for rare and neglected diseases. Its scientists, invited to contribute to a conference on the impact of scientific developments on the Biological and Chemical Weapons Convention, wondered how easy it would be to make its molecule-generating model go rogue.