A tech start-up made a splash last month with a remarkable announcement: Its researchers had used artificial intelligence to design viruses tailored to kill the bacteria causing a dangerous infection. Those viruses were used to treat a sick patient.
The disclosure, in a blog post on the company’s site, drew cautious curiosity from experts and coverage in The New York Times. But now the company, Radical Numerics, has acknowledged that it did not work alone.
Another company, Tabula Bioscience, performed much of the research, including creating the cocktail of viruses, called phages, that were administered to the patient. Radical Numerics made no mention of the partnership or the company in its announcement.
The omission led a leading geneticist, George Church, of Harvard University, to resign on Thursday from the board of Radical Numerics. Dr. Church is also an adviser to Tabula.
Eric Nguyen, the chief executive of Radical Numerics, acknowledged the research partnership in an email to The Times. “We worked closely with Tabula’s team over seven months,” he wrote.
Dr. Nguyen denied that his company had erred in describing the project last month without crediting Tabula. He said confidentiality requirements in the contract had stipulated that his company not disclose the partnership.
In a statement to The Times, Tabula said it “led the phage therapy” and would tell “that story in the near future.”
For over a century, scientists have experimented with bacteria-killing viruses as a way to destroy the microbes that cause infections.
Phage therapy works well for some people but not others, and scientists often can’t say why. Nevertheless, the treatment has so much potential that researchers have turned to cutting-edge tools such as A.I. to make it more effective.
On Oct. 20, in a technical report running more than 4,000 words, Radical Numerics announced what seemed be a big step forward: It had designed new phages with A.I. that were tailored to a specific patient who had an infection resistant to antibiotics and all other available phages.
There is no dispute that the research was conducted and the treatment administered. But Radical Numerics now says that Tabula conducted the lab experiments, and that its researchers had no contact with the doctors who administered the treatment.
Both companies agree that Radical Numerics provided designs for some of the phages in the cocktail, while Tabula provided others. Dr. Nguyen said that leaving Tabula out of the announcement last month was legally required.
“We did not discuss Tabula Bio’s involvement in our earlier communications because our agreement required both companies to keep the collaboration confidential,” he wrote to The Times.
“Both companies committed to keeping the collaboration and its terms confidential and obtaining consent before making public statements about a successful treatment,” he added.
In an email to Dr. Nguyen, Dr. Church rejected that claim as “very weak on common sense and common ethics.”
The controversy arrives amid a spate of conflicts over A.I.’s contributions to science and medicine.
In September, mathematicians suggested that OpenAI took advantage of their research to solve a longstanding puzzle. Then a biologist questioned whether Anthropic had used his findings to discover new enzymes. Both companies denied exploiting the work of other researchers.
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