For the first time, AI-designed viruses have been administered to a human patient. Radical Numerics used Omnii-1 to engineer viruses against an antibiotic-resistant infection. The treatment eliminated the patient's bacteria in laboratory tests before being administered under compassionate use.

[u/141_1337]

[u/space_monster]

the first of a great many I'm sure. the industry needs to start kicking some serious medicine goals.

[u/lapseofreason]

As a cancer survivor and with a close young family member with a rare cancer I really hope these are the start of many breakthroughs - I would love to know more....

[u/141_1337 → u/lapseofreason]

I'm sorry your family is going through that. Radical Numerics is a biotech startup developing an AI called Omnii-1 that learns from DNA, proteins, and other biological data.

Beyond the virus treatment, they've shown promising results in detecting early cancer from blood samples, identifying targets for personalized cancer vaccines, and designing antibodies.

The personalized vaccine research is especially interesting for cancers with unusual mutations. These are early research results, not proven cancer treatments yet, but there's genuine reason to be hopeful.

[u/lapseofreason → u/141_1337]

Thank you for that. We are actually doing a pretty extensive N of 1 approach to this. The cancer is SDH deficient GIST - it has the virtue and the curse of having low TMB but it is also quite indolent. We have preserved tissue from the tumours post surgery and are doing RNA sequencing, WGS, proteomics, immunopeptodomics, metabolomics. Our clinician has grown cell lines with her tissue (hard to do in this disease) and we have done multi-compound testing on organoids we grew as well. We are potentially looking at a personalised vaccine but are unsure of its efficacy with no really compelling targets. No stone unturned !! Here's to a better future

[u/141_1337]

Source:

https://www.radicalnumerics.ai/blog/omnii-phage

[u/Upstairs_Pride_6120]

Not even disclosing the outcome under ethical reasons ls bs btw

[u/karl_mainz → u/Upstairs_Pride_6120]

If they can't disclose the outcome then why disclose anything at all?

"We did a thing, but we can't tell you if it worked or not.."

The fact they did disclose it, makes me suspect the outcome was positive but who knows.

[u/IrisColt → u/karl_mainz]

>The fact they did disclose it, makes me suspect the outcome was positive but who knows.

This.

[u/Batavus_Droogstop → u/karl_mainz]

I can let an AI propose the perfect cocktail of apple juice, water and food coloring to cure cancer, and give it to a cancer patient. Then I will proceed to not tell anyone how it went for ethical and privacy reasons. And I will also be the first so show that AI designed a combination of household goods that could cure cancer (but more research is needed, and an N=1 experiment shouldn't be overinterpreted).

[u/No_Pin9387 → u/Batavus_Droogstop]

Yep, results irl en masse or gtfo

[u/SillyFlyGuy → u/karl_mainz]

"We gave the patient an experimental treatment.." Well that could be anybody.

".. and the patient improved." Aha! I know exactly who that is!

That logic ain't logicking.

[u/Batavus_Droogstop → u/Upstairs_Pride_6120]

Case reports are a figment of our imagination.

[u/IrisColt → u/Upstairs_Pride_6120]

Survived... it's obvious.

[u/metal079 → u/Upstairs_Pride_6120]

I get the reasoning, "we can't admit it worked because otherwise dumbasses will be asking chat gpt how to make themselves viruses and injecting themselves with them" but admitting to doing the test and not showing the results already kinda implies it worked. Because I don't see why it would be an issue releasing the results if it didn't work.

[u/141_1337 → u/Upstairs_Pride_6120]

Hippa goes hard bruh

[u/AmusingVegetable → u/141_1337]

HIPPA protects the patient data and identity, not the medical result of the treatment.

Hiding behind a bullshit reason is what you do when the results are not in your favor.

[u/141_1337 → u/AmusingVegetable]

HIPAA protects individually identifiable health information. An anonymized treatment result can be published, but in an exceptionally rare, single-patient case, even limited clinical information may make the individual identifiable. HHS explicitly recognizes this risk.

They literally talk about here:

https://www.radicalnumerics.ai/blog/omnii-phage

To protect the patient's privacy, we are not disclosing details of their clinical course or outcomes, as even limited clinical information could make the patient identifiable.

[u/AmusingVegetable → u/141_1337]

“Got better” isn’t exactly something that can ID a patient, conversely “died” isn’t exactly identifying for a compassionate use case as it’s the most likely progression for patients selected for compassionate use.

[u/141_1337 → u/AmusingVegetable]

You're right that “improved” or “died” isn't inherently identifying. But HHS explicitly recognizes that rare, publicly known clinical events can become identifiable when combined with other information. That's especially relevant to a first-of-its-kind treatment involving a single patient.

https://amjcaserep.com/abstract/index/idArt/953592

Also, compassionate use doesn't mean death is the most likely outcome. The FDA allows it for serious conditions, not exclusively terminal patients.

I'd welcome publication of the clinical results too, but we don't know enough about this patient's circumstances or consent to conclude the privacy explanation is dishonest.

[u/AmusingVegetable → u/141_1337]

Ok, that makes sense.

[u/Batavus_Droogstop → u/141_1337]

That's BS, case reports exist. There's plenty of things you can do to protect patient identity.

[u/141_1337 → u/Batavus_Droogstop]

To protect the patient's privacy, we are not disclosing details of their clinical course or outcomes, as even limited clinical information could make the patient identifiable.

https://www.radicalnumerics.ai/blog/omnii-phage

Remember HIPPA protects against the release any information that makes a patient identifiable and in cases like these where the treatment is literally a one of, the result itself can be deanonymizing.

[u/Batavus_Droogstop → u/141_1337]

This is well known and accepted if results are important to the field. They are hiding behind privacy rules so they don't have to discuss the outcome.

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13256-026-06487-w

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13256-026-06716-2

[u/141_1337 → u/Batavus_Droogstop]

One is from Spain the other one is from Uganda, none of them are HIPPA protected because that's an American thing...

HHS explicitly recognizes that rare clinical events can make patients identifiable even without names or other direct identifiers.

it's literally right here

Of course clinical outcomes matter, and I'd welcome their publication with appropriate authorization. But these papers don't establish that Radical Numerics is hiding anything. You're treating an absence of evidence as evidence of a negative outcome.

[u/Batavus_Droogstop → u/141_1337]

you are making things up.

https://amjcaserep.com/

https://amjcaserep.com/abstract/index/idArt/953831

https://amjcaserep.com/abstract/index/idArt/953592

[u/141_1337 → u/Batavus_Droogstop]

I checked your new links too. You're citing American Journal of Case Reports, whose own author guidelines explicitly require signed patient authorization before publishing case reports. Their editorial guidance even states that patient consent is mandatory.

https://amjcaserep.com/instructions

HHS also explicitly recognizes that rare clinical events can make patients identifiable even without names.

Of course publishing the outcome would be scientifically valuable. Nobody disputes that. But showing that other cases were published doesn't establish that this patient's outcome can be disclosed without consent or identification risks.

And you still haven't provided evidence that the company is concealing an unfavorable result.

You are literally straight up lying

[u/Batavus_Droogstop → u/141_1337]

Of course you need consent, but that is also the case for giving an experimental treatment. Are they really dumb enough to ask consent for a treatment, but not for publishing the outcome?

And what am I lying about? You keep changing the argument;

First you say it is impossible outright because it's de-anonymising, which I showed evidently is not the case given a vast corput of medical case reports.

Then you say it's an American thing (If anything European GDPR law is more strict btw), which I also showed is not a limitation because there are also loads of US case reports.

And then suddenly you act as if said this is all possible without consent, which I never said or suggested. But anyway, getting consent is the first thing any sane clinician-scientist would do.

[u/141_1337 → u/Batavus_Droogstop]

You're conflating consent to experimental treatment with authorization to publish medical information. HHS explicitly distinguishes the two, even if they're presented on the same form.

Consider the patient's incentives: they want treatment, not publicity. They could easily consent to one while declining the other, especially in a rare case where even limited details could risk identification.

We don't know whether publication consent was requested, granted, or refused. Nor did I claim disclosure was impossible.

I'd welcome clinical results too. But assuming the company is hiding a negative outcome without evidence isn't skepticism; it's speculation.

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/faq/does-the-hipaa-requirement-for-authorization-differ-from-the-common-rule/index.html

[u/sevaiper → u/141_1337]

That is not remotely how hippa works 

[u/External_Counter378]

This is what I see as the cure for many diseases, especially cancer. Phages like this are essentially programmable micro machines which can go attack a variety of diseases.

[u/Chivita2]

Let’s cut through the clickbait.

They are bacteriophages, not human viruses. Phages exclusively infect and destroy bacteria and cannot replicate in human cells. Phage therapy has been practiced safely for over a century. It’s not AI-designed viruses injected into humans.

And the AI didn’t design an organism from scratch. They took a wild-type T7 phage and used Omnii-1 to re-engineer targeted mutations in the gp17 tail fiber protein (the receptor-binding region) to alter host specificity. It’s just localized protein optimization.

On top of that, we do not know the patient’s outcome. The cocktail cleared the bacterial isolate in vitro (in a petri dish), and it was administered under compassionate use (a last-resort thing for critical patients with no remaining options). The company explicitly stated they are not disclosing clinical outcomes. A single compassionate use case with undisclosed clinical results does not prove efficacy.

[u/141_1337 → u/Chivita2]

You're confusing an important technical distinction with a refutation. Bacteriophages are viruses, and modifying existing viral genomes to produce new functions is still AI-driven biological engineering. Omnii-1 achieved 69.9% recovery versus 4.8% for random variants and produced over 2,100 variants outperforming the original in laboratory assays.

That's substantial regardless of whether it designed an entire genome from scratch. And nobody is claiming the patient was cured. The milestone is that AI-designed phages were successfully tested against the patient's bacteria and subsequently administered. Clinical efficacy remains unknown.

[u/Chivita2 → u/141_1337]

I’m not disputing the statistical modeling, achieving 69.9% recovery versus 4.8% for random controls on 11–15 amino acid variants is impressive.

But the issue is the deliberate framing gap between the headline and the biology. It seems like AI-designed viruses administered to humans for the first time, glossing over the fact that bacteriophages are harmless to human cells and have been used therapeutically for over a century.

Furthermore, administering engineered phages under compassionate use isn’t unprecedented, Graham Hatfull’s team did it back in 2019 with genetically engineered phages for M. abscessus, and CRISPR-enhanced phages have already seen clinical trials.

Omnii-1 is a valuable step in automating mutational search spaces to speed up in vitro candidate screening, but I wouldn’t frame it as an unprecedented clinical milestone before any patient outcomes are known.

[u/141_1337 → u/Chivita2]

You're citing previous examples of genetically engineered phages, not AI-designed phages. That's precisely the distinction here. Radical Numerics explicitly acknowledges those earlier treatments in its own report.

And the 69.9% versus 4.8% result wasn't simply statistical modeling. Those were experimentally measured recovery rates of actual engineered phages, alongside thousands of variants tested for biological activity.

The claim was never that AI invented phage therapy, that engineered viruses had never been administered, or that this patient was cured. The milestone is the reported first clinical administration of AI-designed phages, supported by experimental validation of Omnii-1's engineering capabilities.

We agree that clinical efficacy remains unproven. But that's a different question from whether this represents a new milestone in AI-driven biotechnology.

[u/Chivita2 → u/141_1337]

Te title says that AI-designed viruses were administered to humans to destroy antibiotic-resistant bacteria. Now you say it’s a historic milestone because nobody had put an LLM inside the computational design loop of an engineered compassionate-use phage before.

Creating an artificial first by appending the label ‘AI-designed’ to an established clinical practice is just marketing. Computational biology and rational mutagenesis have guided phage engineering for years. It’s the swap of earlier bioinformatics tools for a genomic language model to suggest amino acid substitutions on the gp17 tail fiber, and that is a great pipeline optimization, but it doesn’t fundamentally change what compassionate-use phage therapy is.

And the 69.9% recovery measured in wet-lab assays proves my point, the AI generated sequence candidates, but human scientists still had to synthesize the DNA, reboot the phages in permissive hosts, and run the biological plating.

Nobody is dismissing Omnii-1 as a useful sequence filter. What’s being criticized is selling an unverified, N=1 compassionate-use trial with zero reported clinical outcomes as an unprecedented paradigm shift in human medicine.

[u/Zaflis → u/141_1337]

They said the hamful ones were eliminated, but what about the body's normal and natural ones? Convenient silence here...

[u/DrVonSchlossen]

Not disclosing outcomes seems a bit ridiculous.

[u/Chipitychopity]

Havent felt hunger or thirst in 11 years because of an infection. I'd happily be a Guinee pig

[u/FernandoMM1220]

thats fucking huge holy shit.

[u/Correct-Woodpecker29]

*Pluribus vibes*

[u/Dry-Buyer-5802]

What happens if these ai viruses are capable of mutating and spreading to people and have unintended effects. Just because these viruses kill some bacteria, doesn't mean they won't cause cancer to anyone who comes in contact with the patient. There is no way the AI could know all of the unintended consequences and there will be some.