A “virtual cell” sounds like something researchers could open and start using. Biohub’s is still an ambition, backed by a new $300 million commitment from Google DeepMind, Meta and Isomorphic Labs to build the AI datasets that might help make it possible.
What the funding is for
The three companies are jointly investing $300 million in Biohub, the nonprofit biomedical research organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. The money is part of a $1.8 billion initiative to build datasets that could let researchers ask, predict and answer biological questions digitally.
Biohub, founded in 2016, aims to create a virtual cell that researchers can use to run simulations. The goal is to make it possible to test some biological questions digitally, rather than relying only on physical experiments. The announcement describes a research effort, not a finished virtual cell or a product with a launch date.
Federal agencies have different roles
The US Department of Energy plans to invest more than $500 million over five years. The National Institutes of Health will contribute datasets, repositories and knowledge bases built from previous federal investment totaling more than $500 million.
Those contributions are not described in the same way: the Energy Department’s support is a planned investment, while the NIH’s contribution is access to research resources. The figures therefore should not be read as two new cash grants.
The hard part is building a useful model
Biohub’s head of science, Alex Rives, has described an accurate predictive model of biology as a way to speed up discovery by letting scientists conduct experiments digitally. He also said the work will require coordinated data generation at national and international scale.
That is the work behind the appealing name. A virtual cell depends on assembling enough useful biological data to support reliable predictions. The $300 million commitment backs that effort, but the announcement does not say when researchers will have a working model to use.