Biohub Launches the Virtual Biology Initiative to Galvanize a Global Effort to Create the Open Data Foundation for AI-Accelerated Biology

A $500 million commitment — and a call for the global scientific community to join — aims to unlock predictive models of the human cell to accelerate the cure and prevention of all disease

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., April 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, Biohub announced the Virtual Biology Initiative, a landmark five-year initiative to galvanize a global effort to create the technologies and multi-modal datasets needed to build predictive models of life. Biohub is committing $500 million to anchor the effort: $100 million to help nucleate a coordinated, worldwide data-generation effort beyond what any individual institution could undertake alone, and $400 million to generate data at scale and develop next-generation technologies for measuring, imaging, and engineering biology.

Scaling biological data to build a predictive model of life requires a global effort

For the first time, it is becoming possible to envision a high-accuracy predictive model of the cell. The scientific and technological foundations exist, but achieving this goal will require orders of magnitude more data than is currently available.

Generating these data will require significant, coordinated effort involving leading institutions and funders joining forces.

Biohub is committing resources to support this effort: large-scale compute power, cutting-edge technologies for instrumenting, imaging, and programming biology, and frontier biological and AI science.

Biohub will make the data it generates open and freely available as a resource for the worldwide scientific community.

Several other institutions are coming together with Biohub, including the Allen Institute, Arc Institute, Broad Institute, and Wellcome Sanger Institute, as well as consortia including the Human Cell Atlas and the Human Protein Atlas, to coordinate a larger scale effort. These groups are committed to working together, through coordinated and independent efforts, toward this shared goal.

As a key technology partner, NVIDIA will support the initiative to leverage accelerated computing infrastructure, domain-specific software, and technical expertise, enabling Biohub and its ecosystem of collaborators to generate, process, and analyze large-scale datasets to ultimately train and deploy impactful models for biology.

Renaissance Philanthropy is joining this effort to catalyze the expansion of funding for data generation. Additional funders, research institutions, and partners are expected to participate in these expansion efforts.

Predictive models can reveal biological mechanisms and the causes of disease

Accurate predictive models of the immense complexity of the cell could help scientists understand its fundamental mechanisms and reveal the causes of disease. Such models would allow researchers to ask and answer questions digitally at a scale and rate far beyond what is possible in the laboratory today, accelerating the path to scientific discoveries that could open new approaches for medicine and lead to new therapies and treatments for complex diseases.

Biohub's Virtual Biology Initiative seeks to accelerate progress toward this goal, through investments in imaging, engineering, data generation and infrastructure that will make a comprehensive, high-resolution view of the cell across its molecular, spatial and dynamic dimensions available to the global scientific community.

"To build artificial intelligence that can accurately represent the full complexity of biology and accelerate scientific research, we need orders of magnitude more data than exists today. We need new technologies to observe the cell, from the molecular to the tissue level, and in the context of health and disease. At Biohub, we're committing our resources to solve this problem. Generating this data will require a coordinated global effort. We're thrilled to partner with leading institutions and consortia who are also committed to this and to work with them to galvanize a larger effort to create the foundation for predictive models of the cell," said Biohub Head of Science, Alex Rives.

This initiative is the next step in Biohub's decade-long effort to advance technologies to measure cells across scales and contexts, and to accelerate the scientific understanding of cellular biology, including its support of large-scale data generation projects such as the Human Cell Atlas, the Billion Cells Project, and the Tabula Sapiens multi-organ cell atlas, and a range of integrated grant programs across imaging and instrumentation, spatial molecular biology, and synthetic biology.

Efforts within Biohub and across the scientific community

A much larger global effort will be needed to reach the necessary scale. To help jump start a coordinated global effort, Biohub is committing $100 million to fund external research that will anchor a field-wide data generation effort and advance the frontiers of experimental technology. In doing so, Biohub's Virtual Biology Initiative will build on its longstanding support of the global community working on single-cell biology. Biohub will also contribute engineering and data infrastructure to support the project and build the data foundation it requires.

"Biohub has been an extraordinary partner to the field for a decade, and the Billion Cells Project is a terrific example of why. It brought together and supported groups and turned their efforts into a shared resource the whole community can build on. Expanding that model to the full measurement set needed to train an AI model of the cell and to understand how cells function together in communities is ambitious in the best sense. It's the kind of coordinated, openly shared infrastructure that can genuinely change what's possible in biology. I'm thrilled to see this next chapter begin," remarked Jonathan Weissman, Landon T. Clay Professor of Biology at Whitehead Institute and MIT and an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

This is an undertaking far larger than any one organization. The Protein Data Bank became one of science's most important resources because researchers around the world organized and contributed to it. The Human Genome Project succeeded because the world's leading laboratories aligned around a shared goal.

Leading institutions and international consortia (see below) are working together to align their respective initiatives to generate proteomic, genomic, transcriptomic, cellular, and tissue-level data and develop algorithms and models—as part of a broader shared global effort. The effort will advance large-scale open data resources for AI-powered biological research and enable deeper understanding of cellular programs in health and disease.

"Achieving a predictive understanding of cellular behavior will require coordination and data at a truly global scale. The Human Cell Atlas brings together a global community, data, capabilities, and expertise needed to help make this possible—and efforts like this, where leading partners including Biohub come together, have the potential to accelerate progress in ways no single organization and consortium could achieve alone," says Muzz Haniffa, co-Vice-Chair of the HCA Organising Committee. "In our next phase, the Human Cell Atlas is expanding cell atlases into two and three dimensions using next-generation spatial omics, while building shared frameworks for data integration and predictive AI models. We see strong alignment and complementarity with Biohub's vision and look forward to collaborating with Biohub and our HCA partners around the world on this global effort to help build the open, interoperable foundation needed to accelerate AI-driven discovery in health and disease," says Alexandra-Chloé Villani, co-Vice-Chair of the HCA Organising Committee.

This shared global effort, including Biohub, will generate the data that is critical for building artificial intelligence models for cellular biology. These data will also be a rich source to unlock new scientific insights. A dataset of this magnitude will contain answers to a multitude of scientific questions about cellular biology and the causes of disease.

Within Biohub, we are investing $400 million to build the core set of technologies and infrastructure needed to push the frontiers of research and help scientists expand what can be measured and observed across cellular biology. In next-generation imaging, we're developing cryo-electron tomography that will resolve atomic level details in the cell, and microscopy that can observe millions to billions of cells in living tissues and organisms. We're also building molecular, cellular, and tissue engineering technologies that will enable better experiments and the measurement of more parameters—with the ultimate goal of understanding disease and reprogramming it at the level of cells, molecules and tissues. The internal funding will also help drive data generation within Biohub, which will be made openly available.

This is only the start. The overall global effort will require substantial additional support from other funders. Together with the organizations listed below, we invite other funders and scientific partners to join in this transformative initiative.

Other leading institutions and international consortiums

Leading institutions and international consortiums who have plans to partner in the global effort include:

SOURCE Biohub