What Is a Virtual Cell?

Fabian Theis says a virtual cell, in the way people use the phrase, is a model that predicts how a cell would behave under all kinds of perturbations. He calls that reading a bit too simplistic for the whole idea, and he calls the deeper question maybe a bit of a holy grail in computational biology.

A cell is an input-output system with memory, and the molecules involved are not only RNA. Understanding it means predicting the output given different inputs. Perturbation-prediction models are what the phrase often points at, and those models have taken off. His lab started the work in 2019 with a nonlinear model that did a linear transformation in a latent space. Many pseudo-linear versions still do a good job, because the early data sets and the questions on top of them were still on the simplistic side.

Pharma, he says, desperately needs screens that are specific to a cell-type context, and cannot run them yet at screen scale. He hopes the current rush is not only a kindling from everyone adding AI onto existing work.