The majority of emerging infectious diseases are caused by pathogens that jump from animals to humans, such as Ebola, HIV, flu and Covid-19. Professor Clare Bryant at the University of Cambridge is using Co-Scientist to hunt for the molecular switches that cause severe diseases, like sepsis, in humans when pathogens leap between species, and find new approaches to prevent this happening.

Testing Co-Scientist, Bryant fed it a summary of one of her grant proposals studying flu in birds and humans outlining her lab’s research questions. The tool generated and ranked a set of promising hypotheses — some she'd already considered, some she hadn't. The unfamiliar ones were the most thought-provoking.

When the grant was funded, Bryant fed in the full, detailed proposal. Later, reading through the output on a train to Brussels, she had an "a-ha!" moment: Co-Scientist had prioritised a protein that hadn’t been on her radar, connected to several signalling pathways she was already interested in.…