‘Supergroup’ of scientists trying to battle the specter of man-made viruses

Experts from across health, engineering and technology are hoping to give scientists an ‘enhanced capability’ of detecting the genetically created viruses

A supergroup of scientists has come together to fight the threat of genetically created viruses. The network of labs in London has been launched – combining experts from across health, engineering and technology – to give scientists an “enhanced capability” to “detect novel, engineered organisms”.

Boffins say it’s because the surveillance systems that look for early signs of epidemics, including Covid, bird flu, ebola or Mpox, must be adapted to monitor hospitals, animals, crops and wastewater for signs of anything unnatural spreading.

Professor Neil Ferguson, of Imperial College London, said while bird flu should still be considered a more likely pandemic source, this new department is about looking “20 years in the future”.

He said: “[But] pandemic preparedness is about looking 20 years into the future. If we’re thinking in a 20-year time horizon about biosecurity, we really do need to care about man-made threats and how they might be different from natural threats.”

In 2019, Cambridge researchers created the first living organism with fully synthetic DNA. Last month, Stanford experts in the US revealed a new species of virus created from scratch with a genome designed by AI for the first time.

Both Google and Anthropic have warned their AI models have been used to seek recipes for biological weapons. While it would currently take expertise at elite scientific institutions to engineer artificial microbes and likely a nation state to deploy them as weapons, Prof Ferguson said that will not be the case for ever.

He said: “In five, ten, 15 years’ time, it may only require one or two people … and not very much money.” But in the shorter term it would be easier to engineer viruses to target crops than humans and offered a note of optimism, he said.

Prof Ferguson said: “I don’t think we’re at [a] doomsday scenario at the moment. I personally believe it’s highly unlikely we’ll get an extinction-level event from that type [AI-created] of technology.”

Professor Susan Hopkins, chief executive of the UK Health Security Agency, previously said: “We are facing a more complex biosecurity landscape, driven both by evolving natural pathogens and by advanced technologies that are inherently dual use; capable of driving health security gains but also, if misapplied, enabling harm. Staying ahead of these threats demands closer collaboration between government, academia and industry.”