Ci Chu is Chief Discovery Officer at Xaira Therapeutics, discussing the mathematical limits of training virtual cells on correlation-only databases like CellxGene.
“Fundamentally, we believe our provisional data are underpowered to learn causality, truly.”
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More from Ci Chu
AssertionSupported
Chu: Descriptive Models Fail to Beat Linear Baselines on Causal Biology
“Models that are trained on descriptive data do not yet outperform linear models on causal tasks, perturbational tasks, what we call counterfactual tasks.”
Ci ChuJul 21, 2026▶ 21:47🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
AssertionSupported
Chu: X-Cell Predicts Perturbation Effects In Unseen Activated T Cells
“Critically, Excel has not seen active cell T cells. And it's able to make accurate prediction, not only on the known biology, the TCR complex, predicting their effect accurately, that these are going to inactive the T cells, which It's exactly what we would ex…”
Ci ChuJul 21, 2026▶ 57:35🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
AssertionSupported
Chu: Xaira is first to combine seven genome-wide Perturb-seq campaigns
“It is the first time that someone can put together not just one perturbseek, but seven genome-wide perturbseek campaigns together.”
Ci ChuJul 21, 2026▶ 1:05:59🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
Insight
Chu: Academia drives accidental discovery while industry excels at scaling data
“These innovations take so long and the discovery process can be so accidental, right, that It's perhaps not ideal for pure industry to take on, but once they show early promise, scaling them, and robustifying them, and generating data that's not only massive, …”
Ci ChuJul 21, 2026▶ 1:17:57🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
Insight
Chu: Virtual cell models lag due to high-quality data limitations
“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.”
Ci ChuJul 21, 2026▶ 9:46🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
Opinion
Chu: 2D Perturb-Seq Datasets Will Power Biological Foundation Models
“And I think it's these type of rich two-D datasets that power the training of foundation models of biology.”
Ci ChuJul 21, 2026▶ 27:43🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)
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