GenBio Launches a “Virtual Cell” AI Model

This AI startup, which lists Nobel laureate David Baker among its co-founders, has announced a “world model” of a cell that can simulate both its natural state and responses to successive perturbations, potentially transforming biological research.

Living in a simulation

Simulating a living organism on a computer (in silico) has been a dream of both computer scientists and biologists for decades. However, previous attempts have been hampered by the immense complexity of biology, which existing computational tools could not adequately recreate.

Recent advances in AI may have changed the equation considerably, giving scientists a much better shot at the target. Multiple teams are now developing foundation and other large AI models in biology, including Nucleotide Transformer, Evo, ESM, AlphaFold, GeneFormer, and many others. A foundation model is a large model trained on a very broad dataset so that it learns general-purpose representations that can later be reused for many different tasks.

However, even these huge models remain limited in their scope and modalities. Take AlphaFold, an AI model that predicts protein structures from amino acid sequences. Impressive as it is, it covers only a tiny sliver of what we call life. One proposed route toward actually simulating life is therefore to make multiple specialized models work together within a larger system.