Scientists have developed a molecular “syringe” that can inject proteins, including cancer-killing drugs and gene therapies, directly into human cells.

And the researchers did it using an artificial intelligence (AI) program made by Google’s DeepMind. The AI program, called AlphaFold, previously predicted the structure of nearly every protein known to science.

The team modified a syringe-like protein naturally found in Photorhabdus asymbiotica, a species of bacteria that primarily infects insects. The modified syringe, which was described Wednesday (March 29) in the journal Nature(opens in new tab), has not yet been tested in humans, only in lab dishes and live mice.

But experts say, eventually, the syringe could have medical applications.

“The authors show that this approach can be tuned to target specific cells and to deliver customized protein cargoes (payloads),” Charles Ericson(opens in new tab) and Martin Pilhofer(opens in new tab), who study bacterial cell-cell interactions at ETH Zürich in Switzerland and were not involved in the research, wrote in an accompanying commentary(opens in new tab). “These re-engineered injection complexes represent an exciting biotechnological toolbox that could have applications in various biological systems,” they wrote.

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