Red Queen Bio is using AI to design antibodies for future viruses, WSJ says

Red Queen Bio, a biosecurity startup backed by OpenAI, has raised $36 million in total to design antibody drugs against viruses, including ones that AI systems could one day help create, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The company is starting with antibodies against bird flu and other influenza viruses and plans its first clinical trials in 2027, according to the Journal. It later wants to target coronaviruses, Ebola-like viruses and relatives of smallpox.

Design, test, repeat

Red Queen uses AI to design antibodies that bind tightly to viral targets. It grows cells to produce and test the candidates in the lab, then feeds the results back into its models to design better versions.

“The tighter they bind, the less of them you need,” chief executive Nikolai Eroshenko told the Journal. “Suddenly, you have something that can scale.”

Eroshenko and co-founder Hannu Rajaniemi spun the company out of HelixNano in 2025. OpenAI led its seed round, a $15 million raise announced last November, with Cerberus Ventures, Fifty Years and Halcyon Futures.

Defence at AI speed

“Our mission is to scale biological defenses faster than frontier AI capabilities grow,” the company says on its website.

Red Queen says it never conducts dangerous gain-of-function research and never makes or isolates dangerous pathogens.

“The attackers have as much time as they want to develop a bioweapon. We don’t have years to design a countermeasure,” Olivia Scharfman, a biotechnology fellow at the Institute for Progress, told the Journal.

The startup joins other efforts on AI and biosecurity. Google DeepMind launched an AI biosecurity programme in July. A Cisco study found that no AI model was fully resistant to bioweapon queries. Last week, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei asked the UN Security Council to back a ban on AI bioweapons.