The Virtual Lab: AI Agents Design New SARS-CoV-2 Nanobodies with Experimental Validation

Abstract Science frequently benefits from teams of interdisciplinary researchers. However, most scientists don’t have access to experts from multiple fields. Fortunately, large language models (LLMs) have recently shown an impressive ability to aid researchers across diverse domains by answering scientific questions. Here, we expand the capabilities of LLMs for science by introducing the Virtual Lab, an AI-human research collaboration to perform sophisticated, interdisciplinary science research. The Virtual Lab consists of an LLM principal investigator agent guiding a team of LLM agents with different scientific backgrounds (e.g., a chemist agent, a computer scientist agent, a critic agent), with a human researcher providing high-level feedback. We design the Virtual Lab to conduct scientific research through a series of team meetings, where all the agents discuss a scientific agenda, and individual meetings, where an agent accomplishes a specific task. We demonstrate the power of the Virtual Lab by applying it to design nanobody binders to recent variants of SARS-CoV-2, which is a challenging, open-ended research problem that requires reasoning across diverse fields from biology to computer science. The Virtual Lab creates a novel computational nanobody design pipeline that incorporates ESM, AlphaFold-Multimer, and Rosetta and designs 92 new nanobodies. Experimental validation of those designs reveals a range of functional nanobodies with promising binding profiles across SARS-CoV-2 variants. In particular, two new nanobodies exhibit improved binding to the recent JN.1 or KP.3 variants of SARS-CoV-2 while maintaining strong binding to the ancestral viral spike protein, suggesting exciting candidates for further investigation. This demonstrates the ability of the Virtual Lab to rapidly make impactful, real-world scientific discovery.