Google DeepMind joins Biohub, Meta and the US government on a $1.8B virtual cell effort
The most important thing we can apply AI to is improving medicine and human health - very excited about this partnership with the CZI and the Virtual Biology Initiative!
Context
A shared push to model living cells with AI could speed up drug discovery and basic biology.
Biohub is the science organization backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan through CZI. Axios reported that it is working with Google DeepMind, Meta and the US government to build AI models of living cells.
Deep dive
On October 7, Biohub, the US Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health announced an expansion of the Virtual Biology Initiative, bringing the effort to $1.8 billion. The aim is to generate open, AI-ready biological data and use it to train models that predict how cells behave and respond to drugs and other changes.
Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta are investing $300 million together. DOE plans to invest more than $500 million over five years in measurement, modeling and computing, and NIH will coordinate datasets built with more than $500 million in earlier federal funding. Biohub put in its own $500 million in April.
Research groups including the Allen Institute, Broad Institute and Wellcome Sanger Institute are joining, and NVIDIA is supporting the computing side. Biohub's Alex Rives told CNBC that current cell datasets run to hundreds of millions of cells, while accurate predictive models will need billions.
What to expect next
Rives told CNBC the partners aim to compress decades of work into five years, with a first dataset ready in about a year and accurate predictive models expected within five years. The data will eventually be public, though commercial funders get an embargo period first, and the government-funded work will not carry that restriction.
Rives also said Biohub plans to approach pharmaceutical companies and philanthropies next, so more funders may join.