Nov 24, 2025

Helix-Aegis: LLM Based screening for bio-sequences

Vishnu Vardhan Sai Lanka

We introduce Helix-Aegis, a prototype defensive screening system designed to

detect hazardous biological sequences (toxins, pathogens, virulence factors)

using fine-tuned Large Language Models. While sequence-to-function models

are likely to appear in future DNA synthesis screening pipelines, they currently

lack safety-aligned reasoning, uncertainty awareness, and risk classification. As

such models become more capable, attackers may fine-tune or adversarially

manipulate them to generate sequences that evade naive screening. Our goal is

to explore whether LLM-based guardrails, analogous to LlamaGuard in

text-LLMs, can improve the robustness, interpretability, and safety of

protein-sequence screening.

Reviewer's Comments

Reviewer's Comments

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Helix-Aegis clearly addresses a real and rising risk. Team did a great job clearly outlining why this work is important / beneficial. Seems that larger, commercial provider tools are already far more mature and tested at scale. Plus have access to more data.

This project would be stronger if positioned as an experiment in adding a risk-aware, interpretable layer on top of existing screening pipelines rather than replacing them. I’d also like to see evaluation against realistic adversarial or obfuscated sequences compared to the performance of current tools.

Could this tool be used to provide an explanation to users for why existing black-box tools reject or flag a sequence rather than making the decision?

Cite this work

@misc {

title={

(HckPrj) Helix-Aegis: LLM Based screening for bio-sequences

},

author={

Vishnu Vardhan Sai Lanka

},

date={

11/24/25

},

organization={Apart Research},

note={Research submission to the research sprint hosted by Apart.},

howpublished={https://apartresearch.com}

}

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This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.
This work was done during one weekend by research workshop participants and does not represent the work of Apart Research.