Virtual Cell Model
topic on 3 shows · 9 statements across 5 episodes
Latent Space 
No Priors 
the a16z Podcast
9 statements about Virtual Cell Model, every show
Wang: Virtual cell models will integrate multi-omics to predict cell states
“So eventually what I predict is that a virtual cell model will be able to integrate not only RNC, can integrate more functionally Related, for example, proteinomics or other regulatory side of omics such as ataxic to overall combine all your descriptive omics …”
Zuckerberg: Specialized virtual cell models will merge into a biological Omni model
“I would imagine you're taking these different types of virtual cell models and eventually merging them into the equivalent of like a biological Omni model, kind of like how on the language model side, you had people that did language and then, you know, people…”
Chan: Virtual cell models provide utility even without perfect accuracy
“But I don't think it needs to be a hundred percent accurate to be useful. Because you just want to be able to de-risk the idea on the front end a little bit. And the more and more you de-risk it, the more efficient it gets, obviously. But it'll be useful if yo…”
Zuckerberg: Virtual cell modeling requires a hierarchical protein-to-cell strategy
“Part of the hypothesis is that you can look at all these different cells and you can kind of simulate how they might behave, but you're gonna have a somewhat shallow understanding unless you actually have this hierarchical understanding of what how the subcomp…”
Hsu: Virtual cell models will advance from single cells to whole animals
“There are going to be different phases of capability where initially they model individual cells, then they model pairs of cells, then they model cells in a tissue, and then in a broader physiologically intact animal environment, and those are length scales an…”
Hsu: Virtual cell models do not need mechanistic explanations to be useful
“And I would say similarly with a virtual cell model, it may not tell me literally why, just like a alpha fold doesn't tell me literally why did the protein fold this way and how, but it just told me the end state and it was reasonably accurate. I think that wo…”
Burke: Current virtual cell models have only around 10% predictive accuracy
“The reality is today the best models are very poor at this.
like the predictive ability of the DEGs as we call them is, is in the order of 10%.”
Burke: Virtual cell accuracy is limited by data quality, not architecture
“One of our conjectures is that one of the reasons the models aren't doing well is not just simply model structure. We have a lot of rich structures that we understand in the ML space and machine learning space that the issue is the Data quality.”
Yu: Virtual cell models will directly design disease-reversing drugs
“A big part of our future vision and roadmap is that we think there will be a moment where from a virtual cell model, a drug is spit out, and basically the drug will actually cause a healthy disease cell to become a healthy cell again.”