Our quest to accelerate vaccine and anti-infective technology development has acquired a new urgency as the biological capabilities of frontier AI models have rapidly advanced, and we enter a new era of engineered pathogens and pandemics.
Until very recently, it took substantial education and practical experience in biology to be able to develop and release a superbug, a background that only a few hundred thousand individuals across the world likely have. Today, individuals without any fundamental understanding of virology or molecular biology can use frontier AI models, ubiquitous tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, to substantially close the gap and potentially put themselves on a path to creating a deadly global pandemic for which there are no existing cures. This means we are not only fighting on the already-rapid timescales of biological evolution, but also at the far-accelerated pace of human ingenuity augmented by a generative intelligence trained on the entire corpus of global scientific knowledge, and we must accelerate the development of our defenses now, before it is too late.
It is essential that frontier AI labs and governments work together with pharmaceutical developers to build active defenses against engineered pathogens, but they have only just begun to grapple with this problem, with most funding still going to model safeguards and red teaming. What do we do if that isn’t enough? What next once an AI-designed virus is released and begins spreading across the globe? Without a ‘hot’ pipeline to turn the insights from these exercises into actual medicines, humanity runs the very real risk of being left defenceless in the face of even a single malign actor with access to an LLM and a credit card.
To combat this threat, PopVax is building the Immune Engine, an always-on, full-stack capability to rapidly design, test, and manufacture targeted therapeutics against AI-designed viruses in weeks, not years, using generative AI and our mRNA platform. You can read more about this in our essay announcing PopVax Biosecurity.
If you'd like to collaborate with us to help build or fund the Immune Engine, email biosecurity [at] popvax.com