Google invests millions in Mark Zuckerberg’s efforts to create a ‘virtual cell’
The Verge Emma Roth
Google DeepMind, Meta and Isomorphic Labs are putting $300 million into Biohub. It’s for a giant AI push to build a “virtual cell” for disease research.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Emma Roth — read the original for the full story.
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Google DeepMind, Meta, and Isomorphic Labs are together putting $300 million into Biohub, the nonprofit biomedical research group founded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, according to Reuters. The money is part of a much larger $1.8 billion effort aimed at building AI datasets for biology.
The pitch is bold even by AI standards: create data that lets researchers ask, predict, and answer biological questions digitally. Biohub says that kind of setup could help scientists find new ways to prevent and manage disease without relying only on the old trial-and-error rhythm of lab work.
Biohub was founded in 2016, and its long-running goal is to build what it calls a “virtual cell.” In practice, that means a model researchers can use to run simulations and test biological ideas inside software before — or alongside — work in the real world.
The source also says the US Department of Ene …, but the rest of that detail is cut off. What’s clear is the direction of travel: Big tech keeps trying to turn biology into something computers can probe at scale, and Biohub is now getting a fresh pile of money to make that less hypothetical.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is classic Silicon Valley: when the biology gets messy, build a model and call it a platform. The idea isn’t silly; the habit of wrapping grand scientific aims in AI cash certainly is. If these groups really want better medicine, they should be judged on useful biology, not on how elegantly they can say “virtual cell.”
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