Nobel laureate’s startup unveils first full virtual human cell model

GenBio AI on Tuesday unveiled AIDO Cell, a system it describes as the first virtual cell "world model" capable of simulating human cell behavior across its full biological hierarchy — from DNA and RNA through proteins to whole-cell dynamics — both in a natural state and in response to drugs and other interventions.businesswire

The Palo Alto-based startup, co-founded by 2024 Nobel laureate David Baker and AI scientist Eric Xing, positions AIDO Cell as a step beyond tools like Google DeepMind's Alphabet Inc. ↘ 0.87% AlphaFold, which predicts the structure of individual proteins. AIDO Cell aims to model how the molecular machinery of an entire cell behaves as an integrated system.statnews

"With AlphaFold, you're predicting the structure of one house or learning about one person in that city, whereas in AIDO Cell, you're sort of predicting how that whole city works," Baker told STAT News.statnews

How It Works

AIDO Cell is built on a world model architecture that makes it both multi-scale and stateful. A researcher can perturb the cell at any level — knocking out a gene, for instance — and observe how the effects cascade from gene regulation through protein behavior to the cell as a whole. Because the system remembers previous interventions, sequences of perturbations can build on one another rather than being treated as isolated predictions.businesswire

An accompanying Perspective in Nature Medicine by co-founders Eric Xing, Eran Segal, and Le Song describes a three-stage approach: building foundation models for individual biological modalities, linking those models across scales, and then jointly aligning the entire network into one coherent system.lifespan

Early Results and Limitations

In an early demonstration, GenBio used AIDO Cell to model the effects of imatinib on leukemia cells and found that the system reproduced the drug's known mechanism of action across several levels of cellular biology.businesswire

The system currently supports two widely used immortalized human cell lines — K562, derived from a chronic myeloid leukemia patient, and HepG2, from a liver tumor — with additional cell types in development. GenBio describes this release as "a preview, an early but functional demonstration" and plans to release more advanced versions later this year and into next year.businesswire

Implications for Drug Discovery

The company frames AIDO Cell as a potential virtual testing ground for pharmaceutical research, where only about one in 10,000 compounds that enter the drug pipeline ultimately reaches the clinic. "A system like AIDO Cell enables companies to quickly and accurately evaluate several drug candidates leading to better, safer and more efficient treatments years earlier than is possible today," said co-founder and CSO Ziv Bar-Joseph, formerly head of AI at Sanofi ↘ 1.18%.businesswire

GenBio is preparing to launch an early-access academic collaborator program for scientists across academia, biotech, and pharma.lifespan+1