Virtual Cell

“There are three main AI platforms that we're building here. The first one is Protein Design, work that spun out of our co-founder Dr. David Baker's group from UW. A lot of the current generation of protein designers are here in the company. So there, the think…”

“In the other domains, such as clinical model prediction, such as virtual cell, we are nowhere near the same kind of massive data that are high quality, and I think it's mainly a data limitation issue.”

“Largely speaking, that was a failed attempt in the sense that the biology is just way too complicated to write in a few predefined set of differential equations.”

“Eventually we kind of, we can replace all the cellular experiments by simply running simulations on computer without even running the actual Experiments.”

“What's happening for this field is that we are lacking a concrete definition of virtual cells and people almost equate foundation model With virtual cell, but in my view, virtual cell is probably a much broader concept than just foundation models.”

“We think that in the beginning phase of data collection, as Bo said, I think we're just in the early days of virtual cell building, context and diversity and richness of the data matters. It's not just the total number of cells or total number of sequencing re…”

“I think with, you know, kind of the current generation of models that are being called virtual cells, they are good representations of the underlying data, but, you know, they have a very limited ability to predict what will happen when you make a novel interv…”

“And I think we're about 10 years away probably from something like a virtual cell, like a full virtual cell”

“Virtual cells is actually not that far out. I think we have all the necessary data to generate something like that.”

“I think like you want to kind of build up these models hierarchically so You give them a lot of data about specific proteins, and they can model specific proteins in the cells, and then you can model different cell behavior, and then eventually you get, you ki…”

“So we'll, we'll, we'll build the biohubs around grand biological challenges. The biohubs will build tools that will generate novel data sets. We will build models based on those and then eventually combine the models into an increasingly general view of a virt…”

“Our moonshot is really to make virtual cells at Arc and simulate human biology with foundation models, and, you know, we'd like to figure out something that feels useful for experimentalists, people who are skeptical about technology, you know, they just want …”

“We have two flagship projects, one trying to find Alzheimer's disease drug targets, the other two make these virtual cells”

“I think virtual cells, if anything, is actually way more scoped and rigorous than modeling a digital twin or avatar.”

“Virtual cells, in my opinion, are going to allow us to go beyond the language of structural biology and venture into the language of systems biology and understand how how the drug is interacting with the broader biological system.”

“I think that would be like maybe five years from now. Yeah. So I have a kind of five year project and a lot of the alpha fold, the old alpha fold team are working on that.”