Controlling Biology - Fabian Theis, Helmholtz Munich
Latent Space · 人工智能
Fabian Theis has been one of the key players in the various iterations of the Virtual Cell concept and initiatives. It is not hyperbole at all to say that his lab has been pushing the frontier of algorithms to understand multi-scale, multi-modal (”multiomics”), time-varying biological data. Indeed, he has shaped the large scale vision and data collection through his leadership at Helmholtz, various startups and probably at Biohub itself. Watch the full episode on YouTube… Much of the recent attention in AI x Bio has been on protein and molecular design. AlphaFold, ESM and BioHub , Chai , Leash , Isomporphic, Boltz , Genesis , Octant, Baker Lab, and many many more. After a lot of initial excitement, Virtual Cell projects have received less attention, due in no small part to questions about the effectiveness of large-scale models in solving even basic Virtual Cell problems. A $1.8B bet The Biohub announcement a few weeks ago got a lot of press for the (really) big numbers: $1.8B of commitments [1] from Biohub, NIH, DOE, Google and Meta. The discussion cites new imaging and measurement capabilities, generating large data sets and making the data available for training AI. View post on X ↗ But why are these organizations doubling down on these big bets now? They have been in the works for years now, what is going on that makes now the moment to push? New measurement capabilities and scale infrastructure, are now coming online that make Biohub’s push likely lead to big impact on science. DOE and NIH are developing lab-in-the-loop automation capabilities at scale. Google is scaling and broadening its connectomics capabilities ( episode coming soon!). Biohub itself has worked with various labs to develop and improve imaging platforms like laser phase plate microscopy, light sheet microscopy and advanced post-processing for regular microscopes that reveal deep phenotypic data. These technologies are quickly maturing, and will likely play a big part in the Biohub initiative.