{"id":223445,"date":"2025-10-15T16:08:27","date_gmt":"2025-10-15T21:08:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/why-ai-companies-are-racing-to-build-a-virtual-human-cell"},"modified":"2025-10-15T16:08:27","modified_gmt":"2025-10-15T21:08:27","slug":"why-ai-companies-are-racing-to-build-a-virtual-human-cell","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/why-ai-companies-are-racing-to-build-a-virtual-human-cell","title":{"rendered":"Why AI Companies Are Racing to Build a Virtual Human Cell"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<p><iframe style=\"display: block; margin: 0 auto; width: 100%; aspect-ratio: 4\/3; object-fit: contain;\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/CEOOMYxMvY4?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope;\n   picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Virtual cells could make it faster and easier to discover new drugs. They could also give insight into how cancer cells evade the immune system, or how an individual patient might respond to a given therapy. They might even help basic scientists come up with hypotheses about how cells work that can steer them toward what experiments to do with real cells. \u201cThe overall goal here,\u201d Quake says, \u201cis to try to turn cell biology from a field that\u2019s 90% experimental and 10% computational to the other way around.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Some scientists question how useful predictions made by AI will be, if the AI can\u2019t provide an explanation for them. \u201cThe AI models, normally, are a black box,\u201d says Erick Armingol, a systems biologist and post-doctoral researcher at the Wellcome Sanger Institute in the U.K. In other words, they give you an answer, but they can\u2019t tell you why they gave you that answer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Virtual cells could make it faster and easier to discover new drugs. They could also give insight into how cancer cells evade the immune system, or how an individual patient might respond to a given therapy. They might even help basic scientists come up with hypotheses about how cells work that can steer them toward [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223445"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223445\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}