The Virtual Biology Initiative is set to produce open data to train models capable of predicting how cells will respond to diseases and treatments.
Biohub, the not-for-profit research institute supported by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, announced on October 7 the expansion of its biological data program for AI, called Virtual Biology Initiative, to new partners. All commitments are $1.8 billion in funding, data, calculation and new measurement technologies; Biohub sees it as the most important coordinated effort to date to produce biological data that can be exploited by AI.
Who brings what
Meta, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs together invest $300 million. The U.S. Department of Energy is committing more than $500 million over five years for laboratory measurements, modelling and calculation, while the National Institutes of Health is coordinating federal participation by providing scientific data sets and resources. Biohub had already committed $500 million to the project.
The objective is to measure, across a range of cell types much wider than today, how cells respond to diseases, their environment and treatments, in order to generate predictive models that allow some of the experiments to be conducted digitally. The data will be made public, but private financiers will have one year in advance of their opening.
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