How to build the virtual cell with artificial intelligence: Priorities and opportunities
Cells are essential to understanding health and disease, yet traditional models fall short of modeling and simulating their function and behavior. Advances in AI and omics offer groundbreaking opportunities to create an AI virtual cell (AIVC), a multi-scale, multi-modal large-neural-network-based model that can represent and simulate the behavior of molecules, cells, and tissues across diverse states. This Perspective provides a vision on their design and how collaborative efforts to build AIVCs will transform biological research by allowing high-fidelity simulations, accelerating discoveries, and guiding experimental studies, offering new opportunities for understanding cellular functions and fostering interdisciplinary collaborations in open science.
Authors
- Mohammed AlQuraishi (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6817-1322)
- Aviv Regev (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3293-3158)
- Eric P. Xing (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-9158-4201)
- Xikun Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8346-8594)
- Abby F. Dernburg (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8037-1079)
- Nicholas Sofroniew (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3426-0914)
- David R. Kelley (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7782-3548)
- Srigokul Upadhyayula (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6727-5883)
- Christina V. Theodoris (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1658-1447)
- Viren Jain (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1488-3505)
- Marcel Roed (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1369-8933)
- Theodore Alexandrov (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9464-6125)
- Thomas Kalil
- M. Valer
- Sebastian Otte (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0305-0463)
- Patrícia Flatley Brennan (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5989-9960)
- Charlotte Bunne (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1431-103X)
- Jonah Cool (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0287-011X)
- Anna Kreshuk (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1334-6388)
- Susan Kelley
- Eric Horvitz (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8823-0614)
- Andrea Califano (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4742-3679)
- Amy E. Herr (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6906-2985)
- Yanay Rosen (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1129-9645)
- Emma K. Lundberg (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7034-0850)
- Patrick D. Hsu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9380-2648)
- Ankit Gupta (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9961-1041)
- Bo Wang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-2604-119X)
- Theofanis Karaletsos (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0296-3092)
- Emily B. Fox (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3188-9685)
- Daniel B. Burkhardt (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7744-1363)
- Fabian Joachim Theis (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2419-1943)
- Jay Shendure (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1516-1865)
- Marinka Žitnik (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8530-7228)
- Yusuf Roohani (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9577-5014)
- Stephen R. Quake (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1613-0809)
- Jure Leskovec (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5411-923X)
- Serena Yeung-Levy
- Gregory R. Johnson
- Kirsty Ewing
- Matthias Haury
- Tim Mitchison
Institutions
- Broad Institute (US)
- Northwestern University (US)
- Microsoft (United States) (US)
- Google (United States) (US)
- Gladstone Institutes (US)
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- Harvard University (US)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)
- University of San Diego (US)
- University of California, San Francisco (US)
- University of Toronto (CA)
- University of Washington (US)
- Columbia University Irving Medical Center (US)
- Somerville Hospital (US)
- Helmholtz Zentrum München (DE)
- University of California San Diego (US)
- HES-SO Genève (CH)
- XLIM (FR)
- Futures Group (United States) (US)
- Enzo Life Sciences (United States) (US)
- Evolutionary Genomics (United States) (US)
- Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (AE)
- Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (United States) (US)
- Palo Alto Institute (US)
- Vector Institute (CA)
- Brotman Baty Institute (US)
- Institut de Biologia Evolutiva (ES)
- Stanford Medicine (US)
- New York Consortium in Evolutionary Primatology (US)
- European Molecular Biology Laboratory (DE)
- Center for Systems Biology (US)
- Arc Research Institute
- École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (CH)
- Technical University of Munich (DE)
- Carnegie Mellon University (US)
- Columbia University (US)
- KTH Royal Institute of Technology (SE)
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Stanford University (US)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Cell
- Published
- 2024-12-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2024.11.015
- Citations
- 217
- Primary Topic
- Single-cell and spatial transcriptomics
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 50.27
Funders
- National Science Foundation
- National Institutes of Health
- Genentech
- Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, Stanford University
- National Cancer Institute
- Common Fund