Biohub, the nonprofit backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, is leading a $1.8 billion effort to develop AI models that predict cell behavior. The initiative spans data, lab equipment, and compute, according to Reuters. The group had already pledged $500 million in April for its five-year 'Virtual Biology Initiative.'
Meta, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs are contributing a combined $300 million, while the US Department of Energy is investing over $500 million in lab measurements and compute over five years. The National Institutes of Health are coordinating datasets built with more than $500 million in prior federal funding, and Biohub will standardize them for AI training.
Commercial funders get one year of exclusive access to the data they paid for before it goes public, according to Biohub research lead Alex Rives. Government-funded work will be available without those restrictions. A first dataset should be ready in about a year.
"The goal is to create predictive models that can accelerate drug discovery and understand cellular processes at an unprecedented scale," said Alex Rives, Biohub research lead. The initiative aims to standardize data for AI training and make it accessible to both commercial and government entities.
The announcement follows increased investment in AI-driven biology projects by other companies. Anthropic has built its own biology lab for AI-driven drug development, and the OpenAI Foundation is putting more than $125 million toward biological and medical datasets.
Biohub did not say how the models will be evaluated, and the open question remains about the accuracy and scalability of the AI predictions. The initiative will focus on building foundational datasets and infrastructure for future research.
Source: thedecoder
