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The Cognitive Revolution · 3 min · Oct 20, 2026

Biohub's initiative targets hundreds of billions of cells

AR

Alex Reeves

  • Nathan LabenzHost · Host, The Cognitive Revolution

    Founded AI video company Waymark and red-teamed GPT-4 before its release.

About this segment

Rives says the $1.8B partnership will coordinate large-scale contextual cellular maps. Linking molecular measurements with tissue imaging is a foundation for general cell models.

From “A World Model of Life: Biohub's Alex Rives on Virtual Cells, Measurement, & the $1.8B Data Push”, Oct 20, 2026. Watch the full episode

“be able to do that at the scale of hundreds of billions or more cells.”
ARAlex Reevesat 25:06 · The Cognitive Revolution25:06

Takeaways

  1. The initiative brings together Biohub, DOE, NIH and AI companies.
  2. The maps will link molecular measurements to cells in tissue context.
  3. The target scale is hundreds of billions of cells or more.
Watch 2:49 from 22:47

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 14:36Cell models need information-rich data and useful inductive bias5:10
  2. 26:12A laser phase plate reveals molecules inside living cells3:20
  3. 48:56Health records alone may reveal correlations, not causes3:12

  4. 22:47Biohub's initiative targets hundreds of billions of cells2:49

  5. 30:25Biohub is building imaging tools across biological scales5:33Up next
  6. 38:37Protein models benefit from training across evolution3:51
  7. 45:58A coordinated effort could map cellular health and disease in five years3:09
  8. 42:17Biology models need lab-based verification loops3:52

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 22:53

    That's Outsystems.com slash TCR. So you guys just made some news this week with an announcement of a $1.8 billion initiative with some partners, Biohub and a couple other major institutions. Maybe tell us a little bit about that partnership and what the money is going to go toward. I understand it's largely about creating new data, but, you know, unpack that and tell us what kinds of data are going to be the top priorities.

  2. 23:20

    Yeah, we're incredibly excited about this. So in April, we announced the Virtual Biology Initiative, which with a group of leading scientific institutions and consortia, and, you know, really said that we're going to go out and we're going to really build the data sets to enable virtual biology broadly. And, you know, really the key goal there to start is to really have this kind of, you know, universal or general model of cellular biology.

  3. 23:50

    And, you know, so we've been working over the summer, and we announced, I guess it was just the day before yesterday, you know, really a flagship partnership with the Department of Energy, with the NIH, and with Google DeepMind isomorphic meta, really to come together and coordinate an effort to generate this data. So it's incredibly exciting. We're collaborating with a broad scientific community. We've really put out a call. We're inviting the worldwide scientific community to be a part of this for other funders to join it.

  4. 24:29

    But, you know, there's a core group that's really focused on just, you know, how can we have a more coordinated effort across science to do this? And, you know, there's the team is convening, you know, to kind of create that longer term roadmap. But I think some of the things that are really clear that are going to come out of that is just, you know, dramatic expansion of these kind of maps, contextual maps of cellular.

  5. 25:00

    biology. So things like spatial biology, where you're really able to see the cell and the context of tissue of surrounding cells, be able to link molecular level measurements to imaging, and really be able to do that at the scale of hundreds of billions or more cells. And, you know, the goal is really to move fast here and to kind of create the first data sets that will allow us to start training these, you know, contextual information theoretic models of the cell.