A note on our phage collaboration

I've seen the recent discussion around Radical Numerics, Tabula Bioscience, and George Church, and wanted to share some perspectives.

I have tremendous respect for George and everyone involved in this work. Bringing phages from design to patient care takes an entire ecosystem. Tabula played a leading role in the broader effort, making important scientific and technical contributions, including in AI. We're grateful to have worked with them. They're an innovative company doing important work.

Radical is an AI research lab, and our contribution was AI-generated phages. Phages designed using our genome language models were included as part of a therapeutic cocktail administered to a patient under compassionate use. That's the scientific contribution we were excited to share.

Radical and Tabula had different perspectives on when and how to share this milestone, including public concerns around AI, biosecurity, and the number of clinical cases. We respect those concerns but believed the broader implications of this new capability in genome design warranted earlier disclosure rather than later.

We also understood that Tabula no longer wanted to co-announce with us. As communication and data sharing halted, we sought to honor that preference alongside our confidentiality commitments, to share only our work. In hindsight, we should have communicated more directly about what we planned to share and worked to ensure the contributions of all partners were appropriately represented. This was a mistake.

Personally, I'm still learning how to navigate the balance between sharing scientific progress, attributing collaborators, and honoring confidentiality commitments. That's a lesson I'll carry forward.

I love the science. I also recognize we could have done better, and I want Radical to be a company others trust and want to work with. Going forward, we are establishing clearer expectations around attribution and communication. I'm proud of our scientific contribution with Tabula and honored to be part of what we hope is a new era of treatments for patients who need them.