DNA Is Becoming Programmable. Curing Cancer With AI.

InnovationAIDNA Is Becoming Programmable. Curing Cancer With AI.ByLutz Finger,Contributor.Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. AI leader & Cornell faculty; serial entrepreneur; ex-Google/LinkedInFollow AuthorMay 25, 2026, 10:00am EDT--:-- / --:--This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.This voice experience is generated by AI. Learn more.Cyriac Roeding, Earli at DLD. dpa/picture alliance via Getty ImagesEveryone is talking about "physical AI," the idea that models will finally step out of the chatbot and into the real world of robots, factories, and labs. I ecently hosted Cyriac Roeding, founder of Earli, a company curing cancer with AI, for a Cornell keynote on exactly this topic. He said something I have not stopped thinking about. "Physical AI is only interesting when you train it on physical-world data." That one sentence explains why so many AI strategies, in healthcare and far beyond, are aimed at the wrong target.Here is the part that sounds like science fiction but is not. For fifty years, biology was something we could only read. We are now starting to write it. AlphaFold made proteins predictable and earned a Nobel Prize in 2024. DNA is next. Models like Evo 2, built by the Arc Institute and Nvidia and recently published in Nature, treat the genome as what it actually is, a language with a four-letter alphabet. And if DNA is text, then the same transformer architecture behind ChatGPT can learn to autocomplete a genetic sequence the way it autocompletes a sentence.Missing Model MoatThis is where most people stop and assume the hard work is done. It is not. The best DNA model available, Roeding noted, returns roughly 99% useless output. A model that can write DNA is not a company. It is a starting point.I have made this argument before, back in 2023, about how brittle OpenAI’s model moat is. My point then holds now. Selling a model does not create a moat. Training costs keep falling, open-s...