Zuckerberg's Biohub Leads $1.8 Billion Push to Build AI Models That Predict Cell Behavior

A Coordinated Billion Dollar Effort

The nonprofit Biohub, backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, is coordinating a $1.8 billion effort to build AI models that predict cell behavior, Reuters reports. The initiative spans data, lab equipment, and compute, and aims to speed up drug development by teaching models how cells behave.

Biohub 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.

Data Access and Standardization

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.

Other AI Companies Enter Biology

Other AI companies are also pursuing biology projects. 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.

Sources: The Decoder