How to Build the Virtual Cell with Artificial Intelligence: Priorities and Opportunities

The cell is arguably the smallest unit of life and is central to understanding biology. Accurate modeling of cells is important for this understanding as well as for determining the root causes of disease. Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), combined with the ability to generate large-scale experimental data, present novel opportunities to model cells. Here we propose a vision of AI-powered Virtual Cells, where robust representations of cells and cellular systems under different conditions are directly learned from growing biological data across measurements and scales. We discuss desired capabilities of AI Virtual Cells, including generating universal representations of biological entities across scales, and facilitating interpretable in silico experiments to predict and understand their behavior using Virtual Instruments. We further address the challenges, opportunities and requirements to realize this vision including data needs, evaluation strategies, and community standards and engagement to ensure biological accuracy and broad utility. We envision a future where AI Virtual Cells help identify new drug targets, predict cellular responses to perturbations, as well as scale hypothesis exploration. With open science collaborations across the biomedical ecosystem that includes academia, philanthropy, and the biopharma and AI industries, a comprehensive predictive understanding of cell mechanisms and interactions is within reach.

Generative Modeling with Conditional Autoencoders: Building an Integrated Cell

We present a conditional generative model to learn variation in cell and nuclear morphology and the location of subcellular structures from microscopy images. Our model generalizes to a wide range of subcellular localization and allows for a probabilistic interpretation of cell and nuclear morphology and structure localization from fluorescence images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by producing photo-realistic cell images using our generative model. The conditional nature of the model provides the ability to predict the localization of unobserved structures given cell and nuclear morphology.