❯ Meta, Google DeepMind and Isomorphic Labs put $300 million into Biohub’s Virtual Biology Initiative, bringing total commitments to about $1.8 billion

Building cell data for AIGoogle DeepMind, Alphabet’s drug discovery company Isomorphic Labs and Meta agreed on October 7 to put a combined $300 million into Biohub’s Virtual Biology Initiative. According to Gadget Review, with contributions from the US Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health, total commitments come to about $1.8 billion, though not all of it is cash.

How the $1.8 billion adds upBiohub, the research organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan in 2016, had already committed $500 million to the initiative. The Department of Energy will contribute more than $500 million over five years; the NIH is providing datasets and repositories valued at more than $500 million based on prior federal investment.

The goal is a predictive "virtual cell"The initiative will measure how cells respond across far more conditions than have been tested before, then use that data to train models that let researchers simulate a candidate drug’s effect on a computer before deciding which experiments to run. The first dataset is expected in about a year, with usable predictive models targeted within five. Biohub head of science Alex Rives said an accurate predictive model of biology could dramatically accelerate discovery by letting scientists perform experiments digitally.

Funders get a one-year head startThe data will not be fully public from the start: commercial funders get roughly a year of priority access to the data they helped pay for before it is released. For a drug discovery company like Isomorphic Labs, that one-year lead is what the money buys.

▮ SIGNALLanguage models had the whole internet to learn from, while biology models lack the data itself, which is why the big money in this field is going first into running experiments rather than buying compute.