An artificial intelligence tool that can edit human genes has been produced. The new invention could lead to faster and more precise results in the treatment of diseases.
The tool developed by the US-based startup Profluent edits DNA by producing molecules not found in nature. The research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed and has been published in a pre-print version in bioRxiv, explains that this technology is based on the gene editing method called CRISPR.
CRISPR-Cas9, which won Emanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2020, allows the genetic code to be edited, enabling precise changes to be made to DNA. Inspired by the mechanism used by bacteria to fight viruses, this system was first authorized for therapeutic use last year.
Unlike this technique, the new artificial intelligence tool works by generating gene regulators that do not exist in nature. “These are mechanisms that have never existed on Earth,” says James Fraser, chair of the Department of Bioengineering and Therapeutic Sciences at the University of California San Francisco, who was not involved in the research.
Although the system learns from nature to create them, it innovates.
Profluent’s technology works in a similar way to the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. Just as ChatGPT is trained with books and other texts from the internet, the new AI tool analyzes enormous amounts of biological data to create new gene regulators.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, Profluent CEO Ali Madani says that AI-generated gene editors have been tested in human cells and have achieved a high level of success without editing unwanted regions in DNA.
Trained with a database of 5.1 million CRISPR-related (Cas) proteins, the system produced a gene editor called OpenCRISPR-1. The company suggests that OpenCRISPR-1 performs as well as Cas proteins, reducing the impact on non-targeted regions by 95 percent.
The company announced that it is releasing this gene editor as open source so that other researchers can conduct their own tests. The artificial intelligence technology that produces them, however, has not been made available.
The CRISPR method holds great promise in the field of health, offering a way to change genes that cause inherited diseases such as sickle cell anemia and blindness. The technique is also being used to study Neanderthal brains and breed disease-resistant plants.
Profluent is expected to present the research at the annual meeting of the American Society for Gene and Cell Therapy in May.
