Artificial Intelligence: Vaccine Technology

Lord Patel Excerpts

Thursday 9th July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I completely agree that this technology is hugely important for the good it can do in making vaccines and new medicines. It will change our ability to treat and prevent diseases. It is also true that the same technology can be used for bad things. Like many technologies, it can be misused. Many things are in place already: it is illegal, of course, to make chemical and biological weapons, and the Government take very seriously the threat that can come from new technologies. The biological security strategy was published last year. There is £580 million in the defence investment plan for Porton Down infrastructure for a national biosecurity centre, and £115 million to strengthen defences against AI risk. This is a very active area of work.

[Lord Patel (CB)]

My Lords, the development of Evo 2—which is an AI biological model with 9.3 trillion nucleotides extending over 128,000 different species, including humans—means that there is now a capability to produce proteins, molecular structures and even genomes, and therefore artificial pathogens. So is it time for the UK to have mandatory enforcement and regulation of functional-base synthetic DNA?

[Lord Vallance of Balham (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for his question. The point about the technology is that an enormous amount of good comes from it, and we must not forget that. But yes, there are risks, and we are looking at nucleic acid synthesis using the programmes now available to do that, and we are looking at what can be regulated. Initially it will be a voluntary process, but we are looking at the options to understand and control the use of new synthesis of materials through nucleic acids.