🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model for Drug Discovery (Bo Wang & Ci Chu, Chief Discovery Officer & Chief AI Scientist)
Latent Space RJ Honicky
Xaira Therapeutics developed X-Cell, a causal AI model for predicting how cells respond to genetic changes by training on X-Atlas, a large dataset of CRISPR experiments that directly measure gene expression dependencies rather than just observational correlations. The model scaled successfully after access to approximately 30 times more information-rich experimental data, overcoming previous scaling plateaus where test loss stalled at 3.1B parameters. This approach enables more accurate drug discovery predictions by learning actual causal relationships between genes rather than correlations, shifting the bottleneck from model architecture to data quality.
Why it matters
Xaira Therapeutics is all in on data generation for model building! We talk with Bo Wang and Ci Chu about how and why.
