AI-designed SARS-CoV-2 variants escape prevalent antibodies

While headlines warn that AI could unleash future biological threats, the technology also offers our best defense: a way to anticipate viral evolution and stress-test treatments. Rather than waiting for SARS-CoV-2 to mutate and outrun our immune system, my colleagues and I at École Normale Supérieure and Institut Pasteur built EscapeMap. Published in Cell Systems, our framework generates highly mutated, functional viral proteins to evaluate therapeutics against future evolutionary trajectories long before those mutations surface in the real world.