A $1.8 billion alliance bets on a ‘virtual cell’ to speed up cures

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, the US Department of Energy, the NIH, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta have joined forces in a $1.8 billion push to generate the open biological data needed to train AI models that predict how cells respond to disease and treatment. The goal is a ‘virtual cell’ — software that lets scientists run experiments digitally instead of spending months at the lab bench. If it works, the path from biological question to new cure could get dramatically shorter.