On 12 December 2025, Marion Koopmans, Scientific Director of the PDPC, gave a lecture for the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) at the Trippenhuis in Amsterdam on the possibilities (and dangers) of AI in healthcare. Key messages from this lecture were also reflected in a recent interview with KNAW:

“Developments [of AI in healthcare] are moving fast. For example, American researchers, with the help of AI, recently succeeded in writing a genetic code for a new virus that could kill antibiotic-resistant E. coli bacteria. If you could treat diseases more often in this way, that would of course be fantastic,” says Marion.

At the same time, there are also some important concerns. “You don’t need a lot of imagination to see that the same techniques could also be misused… If you think that through, there are really some creepy aspects to it.”

Fortunately, according to Marion, the risk of misuse is not yet very realistic. “I don’t think it will get out of hand, because selecting infectious bacteriophages is, I think, considerably simpler than selecting infectious human viruses. But we have taken another step forward. And that is why we need to think ahead: how do we regulate this? What is ethical? And who assesses this?”

Read the full (Dutch) interview with Marion Koopmans on the KNAW website.