Biohub, the US government and Google commit $1.8 billion to data for an SI "virtual cell" model
Prepared by Sintelligent with the help of SI. Published in SI: . Updated: .
Biology is about to be taught to predict a cell in a computer, so experiments could start on a screen rather than in a test tube.
Biohub (a science organization backed by Zuckerberg), the US Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health announced a $1.8 billion initiative to build open biological data suitable for training SI. Its base is Biohub's $500 million commitment ($400 million for new measurement technologies, $100 million for outside research); the Department of Energy will invest more than $500 million over five years, NIH more than $500 million to coordinate existing datasets, and Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta $300 million together. The goal is predictive models of cell behavior: in the words of Biohub's head of science Alex Rives, they would make it possible to run experiments digitally. Participants include the Allen Institute, the Broad Institute, the Wellcome Sanger Institute, NVIDIA and others.
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