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Ferdous Nasri

@ferbsx.bsky.social
47 followers 41 following 12 posts

AI × bioinformatics for global health 🧬🤖 | PhD researcher @HPI | code curious co-founder

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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
The bottleneck for AI in science isn't just smarter models. It's the missing infrastructure and trust to rely on them. gget virus is one piece of that. The bigger goal is still to make AI genuinely able to accelerate global health. That's the future I want to help build! 🚀
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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
So proud of our collaborative effort spanning @broadinstitute.org , @hpi.bsky.social , NCBI & @anthropic.com . This is what international, cross-institutional science looks like!
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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Hugely grateful to my brilliant collaborators Laura Luebbert, @sarahgurev.bsky.social, Patrick Varilly, @krithik-bs.bsky.social, Nuala O'Leary, @jcoolscience.bsky.social, @renardlab.bsky.social & @pardissabeti.bsky.social!💙
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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
"Using AI agents to navigate biological data infrastructure is like driving through an old city that was designed before cars." Laura Luebbert in the @anthropic.com blog post about our work. Adding highway tunnels, like gget virus, is the fix! www.anthropic.com/research/age...
anthropic.com
Paving the way for agents in biology
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that's working to build reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
I'm very excited to share our pre-print on this work: arxiv.org/abs/2606.06749
arxiv.org
Deterministic access to global viral sequence data enables robust agentic scientific discovery
Public viral genome resources such as the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) Virus database are central to outbreak response, evolutionary analysis, vaccine design, and genomic surve...
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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
With the right tool, model choice is less important. A cheaper model + gget virus beats an expensive model alone. Reliable science shouldn't depend on having the newest, priciest model. It should depend on solid infrastructure. We need to build for agents. 🛣️
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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
We built VirBench, 120 real-world queries across 40 pathogens + manually verified ground truths. The same agent often gave different answers to the same query. With gget virus, response stability rose to 0.92-1.00. In outbreak response, determinism isn't luxury, it's required.
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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
AI agents querying NCBI Virus are unreliable because the access points aren't built for them. Our fix: gget virus! A deterministic retrieval layer that does the messy work (batching, filtering, reconciling APIs). Prompt agents to use it and watch the accuracy rise above 90%.
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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Biological databases were built for humans clicking through web pages, not for agents. When we tested leading research agents (Claude, GPT, Biomni, Edison) on retrieving viral sequences, the accuracy was between 16.9% and 91.3%. In an outbreak, the bar is effectively at 100%.
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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 10/06/2026
Use of AI agents is becoming more prevalent in science. But in an outbreak, a single wrong sequence can shift what we think a virus came from, or if a treatment still works. We ask, can a deterministic retrieval layer fix the unreliability of AI agents querying NCBI Virus? 🧵
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Reposted by Ferdous Nasri
Pascal Iversen @pascivers.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
Despite hundreds of published models for cancer drug response prediction, none are used in clinical practice. Why? In our preprint, we outline key challenges and introduce a living benchmark to help the field move forward. Check out the thread by my co–first author @judith-bernett.bsky.social:
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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 30/05/2025
Such a fun run! Thanks to @hpi.bsky.social for making it possible 🎉
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Reposted by Ferdous Nasri
Renard Lab @renardlab.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Ferdous Nasri presenting her work on the 'Spatio-temporal immunity index tool for infectious diseases' at the Digital Health Summit at University of Cape Town in South Africa!
Ferdous smiling in front of her poster.
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Ferdous Nasri @ferbsx.bsky.social · 07/02/2025
Happy that I had the honour of presenting my work at the Digital Health Summit in Cape Town, and got the chance to get into great discussions with researchers on the continent! Thanks to Prof. Melissa Densmore for organising the summit and bringing us all together 💐
Ferdous presenting a poster on her research on "Saptio-temporal immunity index tool for infectious diseases"Group photo of the Digital Health Summit attendees at the University of Cape Town in South Africa.
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