Google DeepMind, Meta and AI drug-discovery company Isomorphic Labs will jointly invest $300 million in the Virtual Biology initiative led by the non-profit biomedical research organization Biohub, The Verge reported on October 7. The project marshals $1.8 billion in combined funding, data, and computing and measurement resources.

The central goal is a large-scale biological dataset that AI can train on, leading to virtual cell models that predict how cells respond to disease, drugs and other interventions — so researchers can run first-pass experiments digitally before the lab.

The US government is participating too: the Department of Energy will invest more than $500 million over five years in national-lab supercomputers and imaging technology, while NIH links and standardizes its biological datasets for AI training. Big-lab competition is heating up in biology, and this is the largest coordinated bet yet on AI-simulated cells.