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.
GrantsWallenberg Foundation Cancer Cell Map Initiative (NCI Center for Cancer Systems Biology) Bridge2AI Program (NIH Common Fund) Schmidt Futures GSK Zuckerberg Initiative Stanford Data Applications Initiative NSF Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative