❯ OpenAI-backed Red Queen Bio, with $36 million raised, uses AI to design antibodies against viruses that AI itself could help create

Antibodies ready for AI-designed virusesThe Wall Street Journal reports that Red Queen Bio, an OpenAI-backed biosecurity startup with $36 million raised in total, is racing to design antibodies that can be manufactured to protect against a range of potential pathogens, including the seemingly sci-fi threat of an AI-designed virus.

AI-designed antibody drugsThe company uses AI to design antibodies that bind tightly to viral targets, produces candidates in cells in the lab, tests them, and feeds the results back into its models to design better versions. It is starting with antibodies against bird flu and other influenza viruses, plans first clinical trials in 2027, and later wants to target coronaviruses, Ebola-like viruses and relatives of smallpox. It says it never does gain-of-function research and never makes or isolates dangerous pathogens.

A seed round led by OpenAIOpenAI led the $15 million seed round announced last November, with Cerberus Ventures, Fifty Years and Halcyon Futures joining. Founders Eroshenko and Hannu Rajaniemi spun the company out of HelixNano in 2025, and its website states the mission as scaling biological defenses faster than frontier AI capabilities grow.

The model builder also funds the defenseOpenAI is developing more capable models while funding a company built to counter AI-related biological risk. The same day, it shelved GPT-6.1 Astra after internal testing. Defense startups like this remain preclinical, and whether they can produce a usable drug will be answered by the 2027 trials.

▪ SIGNALAI’s biological risk has spawned a funding category devoted to defense, backed by the same side that is creating the risk.