Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s Biohub is investing $500 million to build AI models of human cells, as tech giants race to bring artificial intelligence into biology.
Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are building artificial intelligence (AI) models of human cells, in a project they say could help “accelerate the cure and prevention of all diseases”.
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Their non-profit, Biohub, last week announced a five-year initiative to create the technologies and datasets needed to build predictive models of human cells.
The organisation said the data it generates will be made open and freely available to researchers worldwide.
Biohub says AI simulations of human cells could allow researchers to study disease digitally at a scale and speed not possible in the laboratory today. If accurate enough, such models could help scientists understand how cells behave in health and disease, reveal the causes of disease and point towards new treatments.
What is Biohub?
Biohub's long-term goal is to cure all human disease through the intersection of AI and biology, Zuckerberg said last year.
In 2016, the couple set up the organisation to bring together scientists and engineers to develop technologies that “observe, measure and program biology at the cellular level”.
Biohub said it has since gathered the largest single-cell datasets globally and built specialised large-scale computing infrastructure dedicated to biological research.
The new initiative reflects a growing belief across the life sciences industry that AI models trained on vast biological datasets could transform how drugs, treatments and therapies are discovered.
The organisation will spend $400 million (around €348 million) on its own work and make a further $100 million (around €87 million) available to external researchers. Its partners include chipmaker Nvidia and leading research institutions.
Data is the challenge
Biohub says scale will be central to the effort as AI predictions become more useful as the volume and quality of biological data increase.
“To build artificial intelligence that can accurately represent the full complexity of biology and accelerate scientific research, we need orders of magnitude more data than exists today,” Alex Rives, Biohub’s head of science, said in an announcement.
“We need new technologies to observe the cell, from the molecular to the tissue level, and in the context of health and disease,” he added.”
But researchers l do not know how much data will be needed to make cellular models accurate enough to produce reliable predictions.
Biohub also said a much greater global effort will be needed to reach the necessary scale.
Rives said he hoped other funders would add to the funding Biohub is making available to outside researchers.
AI-powered biology is an emerging industry, as research organisations, technology companies and drug developers look for ways to use machine learning to understand disease and design new treatments more quickly.
Other technology companies are also pushing into AI-powered biology.
Isomorphic Labs, an Alphabet company built on Google’s DeepMind, is using AI for drug discovery and says it is working to design new medicines.
Microsoft has also released several healthcare AI models, including those for medical imaging, genomics, clinical records and biomedical research, while Nvidia’s BioNeMo platform is being used by life sciences companies for AI-driven drug discovery.
