Audrey Carleton

Machine learning has offered the pharmaceutical industry a lot. It automated the drug discovery process, making it easier to identify proteins that indicate disease, predicting molecules that will effectively bind to them to treat it, and shortened the process by which essential medicines—like COVID-19 vaccines—get rolled out.

Machine learning has also made it easier to make bioweapons at scale using these same tools, a group of researchers warned in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence this month. In the paper, the authors trained a drug development tool to identify  40,000 potential bioweapons in just six hours.