Overview
- Biohub announced Wednesday that it and partners including the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, Google DeepMind, Meta and Isomorphic Labs have pledged a combined $1.8 billion to the Virtual Biology Initiative.
- The funding package pools Biohub’s prior $500 million, more than $500 million from the DOE over five years, over $500 million in NIH-coordinated federal resources and $300 million from Meta, DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs.
- Partners said they will produce a first large standardized dataset in about one year and aim to develop accurate predictive models of cellular behavior within roughly five years.
- Planned measurements include spatial transcriptomics and large perturbation screens, and the group says models will need billions to eventually trillions of cell-level measurements to reach reliable predictions.
- Government-funded data will carry no commercial limits and privately funded data will have a one-year embargo for funders, a compromise meant to attract private investment while committing to eventual public release; observers note technical risks in whether biology will scale like other AI domains.