Virtual cell

Why AlphaFold Didn't Solve Protein Folding — Pushmeet Kohli, Google DeepMind & Sal Candido, Biohub

Why AlphaFold Didn't Solve Protein Folding — Pushmeet Kohli, Google DeepMind & Sal Candido, Biohub

A panel with Google DeepMind's Pushmeet Kohli and Biohub's Sal Candido, moderated by Brandon Anderson, examines how AI should be built for biology. Topics include scaling laws and data quality, the bitter lesson applied to data, AlphaFold's handcrafted design and its limits, protein dynamics, cryo-EM as a richer data source, trust and calibration versus interpretability, and why curing disease requires 10x breakthroughs.

Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)

Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)

Bo Wang and Ci Chu of Xaira Therapeutics introduce X-Cell, a 4.9-billion-parameter diffusion language model designed to predict cellular responses to genetic perturbations. Trained on PISCES, the largest genome-wide CRISPRi Perturb-seq dataset (25.6 million single cells across 16 contexts), X-Cell overcomes limitations of previous observational models. The discussion highlights the critical role of high-quality, causal data, X-Cell's architecture advantages, and its demonstrated ability to generalize to unseen cell types and primary cells, marking a significant step towards truly predictive virtual cell models in drug discovery.

Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Cure All Disease

Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Cure All Disease

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) discuss their strategy to accelerate scientific discovery through the Biohub, an operating philanthropy at the intersection of frontier AI and biology. They detail the development of foundational tools like the Cell Atlas, a 'periodic table for biology,' and their new focus on building virtual cell models to allow scientists to test high-risk hypotheses in silico, ultimately aiming to cure, prevent, and manage all diseases.