Bo Wang, Chief AI Scientist at Xaira Therapeutics, discusses the history of computational biology and why 'Virtual Cell 1.0' mathematical modeling efforts twenty years ago proved unsuccessful.
“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.”
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More from Bo Wang
AssertionNot checkable as stated
Wang: X-Cell Is First to Predict Unseen Cell Line Perturbations
“One of the rewarding signals I receive after we develop Excel is that like it's a wow moment from biologists that this is the first time biologists actually find the model can predict exactly how these unseen cell lines kind of respond to different perturbatio…”
Bo WangJul 21, 2026▶ 7:54🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Wang: Virtual cell AI models will eventually replace physical cellular experiments
“Eventually we kind of, we can replace all the cellular experiments by simply running simulations on computer without even running the actual Experiments.”
Bo WangJul 21, 2026▶ 17:35🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
AssertionSupported
Wang: Diffusion Outperforms Autoregressive Models on Unseen Cellular Tasks
“We find that switching from autoregressive training to division language models give a significant improvement over some of the harder tasks, particularly generalized to unseen tasks.”
Bo WangJul 21, 2026▶ 52:00🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
Insight
Wang: Data Quality and Scale Matter More Than Architecture or Priors
“Overall, if we have to give an order, my order would be the quality among scale of the datasets, and then the architecture, and then the prior knowledge.”
Bo WangJul 21, 2026▶ 52:51🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
PredictionNot checkable as stated
Wang: Foundation models on causal data will beat linear baselines
“I believe that foundation model or other more complicated AI models that trend on the right data will outperform these linear models in harder tasks, particularly in generalization tasks.”
Bo WangJul 21, 2026▶ 1:04:25🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
AssertionSupported
Wang: X-Cell Can Predict Combinatorial Gene Perturbations In Silico
“This is also why we incorporate PPI networks as the prior knowledge into our model. And although the model right now are trained on single gene perturbations, but once the model is trained, you can actually predict combinatorial perturbations just on the model…”
Bo WangJul 21, 2026▶ 1:09:55🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
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