AI giant Anthropic has announced the discovery of a new enzyme system in bacterial DNA that it said could “represent a new gene editing mechanism” similar to the groundbreaking CRISPR tool.
Anthropic said on Wednesday that its signature AI model, Claude, had “autonomously” discovered the system at the prompting of researchers working at the company’s recently established biology research lab in San Francisco.
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The tech giant said the system showed characteristics found in only a handful of other “programmable” structures and displayed a “pattern reminiscent of CRISPR”, a genome-editing mechanism found in bacteria.
CRISPR technology has been credited with advancing the treatment of a range of diseases, including sickle cell disease and cancer.
Anthropic, which is at the centre of a vigorous global debate about how to maximise the benefits of AI while mitigating catastrophic risks, said it had not determined the function of the system. It said Claude discovered the system after spending 21 hours searching a large database of DNA sequences.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has claimed that AI could cure most diseases within five to 10 years, said in a post on X that his company suspects the “molecular machine” could “represent a new gene editing mechanism”. He said AI was only at the “very beginning” of making discoveries that could lead to medical breakthroughs.
“I’m genuinely rooting for all of the frontier labs to seriously get into biological discovery, and I’m excited about what comes out of it,” Amodei added.
Stanley Qi, an associate professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, described the reported discovery as “incredibly exciting.”
“What stands out is its ability to recognize an unusual biological pattern that was difficult to detect before, and to pursue it comprehensively as a research question,” Qi told Al Jazeera.
“Nature contains an enormous diversity of molecular systems we barely understand, and some patterns are very complicated but highly meaningful; AI could greatly expand our ability to explore them more effectively and rapidly, in this case, in just 21 hours,” he said.
However, Kevin Blake, a microbiologist at Washington University School of Medicine, expressed scepticism about the scientific significance of the announcement.
“Because the identified array is ‘CRISPR-like’, some have leaped to conclude Anthropic discovered the ‘next CRISPR’ – ie, a Nobel Prize-winning gene editing technology,” Blake told Al Jazeera.
“CRISPR-the-technology is very different from CRISPR in nature, which is basically a bacterium’s immune system. It has long been known that there are countless CRISPR-like sequences we have yet to identify and catalogue because there are millions of bacterial species we have yet to study,” Blake said.
“There’s nothing to indicate this is a rival to CRISPR-the-technology, or could be developed into any kind of therapeutic or practical application,” he added.
Emmanuelle Charpentier, a microbiologist at the Max Planck Unit for the Science of Pathogens, and Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, pioneered the use of the naturally occurring CRISPR system to edit DNA in living organisms, earning the pair the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Last year, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in the US announced that doctors had treated a patient with a customised CRISPR gene-editing therapy for the first time.
In what the hospital called a “historic” medical breakthrough, researchers developed a bespoke therapy to successfully treat an infant born with carbamoyl phosphate synthetase 1 deficiency, a rare metabolic disease.
