When it comes to putting strange substances into your body in 2026, the sky’s the limit.
First there were black-market Russian peptides — and now there are AI-generated viruses, which one startup claims has been used to successfully treat a bacterial infection.
On Tuesday, the company called Radical Numerics published a technical paper on its website, explaining the process by which they trialed an AI-engineered viral treatment on a human subject.
Targeting bacteria with special viruses isn’t new — it’s called “phage therapy,” and it involves deploying viruses that specifically target harmful microscopic organisms. But the hunt for viruses capable of locking onto a particular infection is arduous, and Radical Numerics says it’s found a way to use AI to revolutionize the process.
Yet as the New York Times notes in its reporting, Radical Numerics’ research is really more like a blog post — not only was the study self-published, rather than being vetted by a scientific journal, but it hasn’t even been peer reviewed. Making matters even murkier, the company declined to share clinical information about the patient or the doctors involved with the NYT, citing the proprietary nature of a treatment it hopes to monetize.
“We take our responsibility to protect patient confidentiality and maintain the trust of our clinical partners extremely seriously,” CEO of Radical Numerics Eric Nguyen told the paper. “We intend to publish our scientific findings through peer-reviewed research, with any future disclosure of clinical details subject to appropriate consent.”
As Harvard microbiologist Michael Baym told the NYT, “if it works, that’s incredible,” but his “impulse is to be skeptical.”
As the saying goes, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence — and that goes double when you’re running a venture-backed commercial lab exposing sick people to AI-generated viruses.
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