Forecasting the next variant
Health Forecasting the next variant Professor Eugene Shakhnovich (from left), Dianzhuo (John) Wang, and Vaibhav Mohanty worked together on the studies.Veasey Conway/Harvard Staff Photographer Yahya Chaudhry Harvard Correspondent July 3, 2025 5 min read Harvard team fuses biophysics and AI to predict viral threats When the first reports of a new COVID-19 variant emerge, scientists worldwide scramble to answer a critical question: Will this new strain be more contagious or more severe than its predecessors? By the time answers arrive, it’s frequently too late to inform immediate public policy decisions or adjust vaccine strategies, costing public health officials valuable time, effort, and resources. In a pair of recent publications in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a research team in the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology combined biophysics with artificial intelligence to identify high-risk viral variants in record time — offering a transformative approach for handling pandemics. Their goal: to get ahead of a virus by forecasting...