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Biohub, the U.S. Department of Energy, the NIH, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, and Meta jointly committed $1.8 billion to generate AI-ready open biological datasets, the largest coordinated effort to date to enable predictive AI models of biology and a 'virtual cell'.
Arc Institute argues that virtual cell models can only predict how cell types respond to perturbations if they are trained on high-quality causal data across diverse contexts, so technical noise is not mistaken for real biology.
Arc Institute announces the 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge, a global competition to predict cell responses to stimuli, with a $100,000 grand prize, starting August 20.
Immunologist Derya Unutmaz discusses in the podcast how he used OpenAI's Codex and reasoning models to build complex biological simulation applications (such as flow cytometry analysis tools, T-cell receptor simulators), and looks forward to the future of AI-driven 'virtual cells' and digital twins.