The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
Wang: Next version of X-Cell will infer spatial cellular representations
“However, definitely our ongoing work and the next version of Excel will be able to infer the spatially aware representations for different cells.”
Wang: X-Cell trains on causal perturbation data unlike static models
“What sets Excel different from these static expression models such as SGB or geneformers is that we actually, instead of training on gene expression datasets, we train on causal datasets. We train on massive amount of genome-wide perturbation datasets so that …”
Wang: Academia is the primary source of innovation in biotech
“I still deeply believe that academic is the main source of innovation for the whole field, and particularly when it comes to biotech.”
Wang: X-Cell predicts cell responses to genetic and chemical perturbations
“X-Cell is Xera's first virtual cell models. It is an AI model that can predict the response to genetic perturbations. Certainly we can extend it to other type of interventions such as drug perturbations chemical perturbations, et cetera.”
Wang: Differential Equation Models Failed Because Biology Is Too Complex
“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.”
Wang: Virtual cells are a much broader concept than foundation models
“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.”
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 …”
Wang: Shuffling gene order does not alter expression biology
“For DNA sequences, the order of ATTG make total sense to us, right? But for expression data, they're literally just matrices. So it's really hard to assume, ah, an inherent order of genes. Even if we shuffle the order of genes, I think the biology doesn't chan…”
Wang: Autoregressive Models Type Sequentially, Diffusion Models Iteratively Edit
“What's the difference between autoregressive training versus diffusion language models is that it kind of, you can think of autoregressive training as typing. There is, for example, I like coffee, you have to type I, and then like, and coffee. There's inherent…”
Wang: Average single-cell profiles can beat technical replicates on MAE
“Because single cell data set are so sparse, the average profiles of all the cells, certainly you kind of, you can imagine is a great minimum kind of local optimum to minimize the MAEs. This is why sometimes the average profile of cells has lower MAEs even than…”
Wang: Academic researchers have unique access to restricted healthcare datasets
“By being a professor in academic, we also have access to lots of healthcare data sets, which are very hard for industry to access due to many illegal reasons or regulatory reasons.”
Wang: scGPT Is Widely Used by Pharma Single-Cell Teams
“This is also why SCGBT quickly become one of the most widely used single cell foundation model in pharma companies.”
Wang: Agentic AI Inverts Research Time From Coding to Debugging
“We used to spend lots of time coding, a little bit of time just debugging, but now we let the agent do most of the coding, but we spend most of time debugging, which seems to be definitely interesting to me”
Wang: Destructive Cell Sequencing Limits Existing Models to Static Snapshots
“In order to sequence the cell, you have to kill the cell, right? So can we have a technology that can measure the cell states at different time points for the same set of cells? I think that will bring a very different dimension to the data set so that we can …”