Claude Science is Here, Antibiotics Designed by Text Prompt Among Applications (genengnews.com)
- Reference: 0184214556
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/26/06/30/1844221/claude-science-is-here-antibiotics-designed-by-text-prompt-among-applications
- Source link: https://www.genengnews.com/topics/artificial-intelligence/claude-science-is-here-antibiotics-designed-by-text-prompt-among-applications/
> In a Claude Science demo, Oliver Vince, PhD, co-founder at Basecamp, uploaded a sample patient microbiology report. When given a simple natural language prompt, the platform designed peptides, predicted their efficacy, and provided a shortlist of candidates most likely to succeed in experiments in minutes. While generating human-ready antibiotics at the click of a button is still a step away, Vince said democratizing these tools is a powerful first step, particularly for researchers in regions where accelerated computing infrastructure is not readily accessible. "Most models require you to be a computational scientist," Vince told GEN Edge. "Now, potentially any clinician in the world can chat with Claude and design an antibiotic that may work."
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-science-ai-workbench
[2] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.01.12.699009v1
[3] https://www.genengnews.com/topics/artificial-intelligence/claude-science-is-here-antibiotics-designed-by-text-prompt-among-applications/
Beat you to it! (Score:2)
Computer. Cure Cancer.
DONE!
Name it Super WebMD (Score:1)
Oh boy! Now AI can feed my paranoia and tell me I have some crazy disease and make a designer cocktail recipe. Claude, design me a vaccine to cure death.
The evil genie (Score:3)
I'm reminded of the evil genie that would "corrupt" a person's wish to give them exactly what they asked for even though it wasn't really what they wanted.
With no life there can be no death.
Be careful what you wish for.
Re: (Score:3)
> 'm reminded of the evil genie that would "corrupt" a person's wish to give them exactly what they asked for even though it wasn't really what they wanted.
Wishmaster is the movie. And X-Files did a more family-friendly episode.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not just a movie (they made sequels!) but the X-Files episode executes the idea better as the Wishmaster films are horror schlock, but still enjoyable for fans of the genre. The idea has been around forever (or at least as far back as One Thousand and One Nights) as anyone with a creative DM knows. Most religions probably have their own versions of the story.
Re: (Score:3)
It's not like a human designed drug doesn't have a lot of check done before it is manufactured. You don't just guess a recipe and then manufacture a drug ...
Suuuure (Score:2)
No reason why actual antibiotics requires long and careful testing to make sure they are reasonably safe. We can do away with all that now!
Re: (Score:2)
The summary explicitly mentions "a shortlist of candidates most likely to succeed in experiments"- so they are very aware that these systems may be wrong. If there's a legitimate criticism here, it is that it isn't obvious that these aren't short lists very similar to if not identical to the lists an expert would come up with. But that's a different claim.
Re: (Score:2)
Even that is good news, because it means you don't need to expert to come up with them, but they can directly start at checking and testing the shortlist, cutting R&D time. A problem would be that the list may be less extensive and skipping over better solutions. On the other hand, do we know if the experts list is as extensive as it could be? Drug design involves a lot of randomness and luck for the first prototypes and nobody knows if the expert has more luck with their inspiration than the machine wi
Re: (Score:2)
While it does cut down on time, there is a massive problem here: Experts need to maintain their expertise. With the use of LLMs to replace them, that does not happen anymore or happens less. As we clearly already have to few experts, any LLM use is too much.
What happens long-term is that we will not have the experts that create the data the LLM was trained on anymore and no updates happen. This then leads to complete stagnation of the discipline, which is much, much worse than slow discoveries. Typical "nex
Hogwash (Score:3)
Given how new all these systems are, even if they actually do work, there is zero chance these claims have undergone the rigorous testing needed to support them.
I LOL'd (Score:2)
"Now, potentially any clinician in the world can chat with Claude and design an antibiotic that may work"
MAY work, or MAY cause immediate bowel explosion and death.
"When given a simple natural language prompt, the platform designed peptides, predicted their efficacy, and provided a shortlist of candidates most likely to succeed in experiments in minutes"
Heck, it's FDA approved then. Ship it!
Why your wife died? (Score:2)
Well, there was a typo in the antibiotic generation prompt fed to the lab machine.
Re: Why your wife died? (Score:3)
Typos are not usually a big deal because of how tokens work. Letting AI flatter you so you will accept every edit it makes is the real risk. It will go off plan without warning, it will forget important requirements or prohibitions. And it will subtly alter goals in order to retroactively support its poor activities, that includes gaslighting you about the whole thing.