Pre-registration for the 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge opens today. Start building your team and say hello in our Discord. The full competition launches August 20. virtualcellchallenge.org

Virtual Cell Challenge

The competition, hosted by Arc Institute at virtualcellchallenge.org and sponsored by NVIDIA, 10x Genomics, and Ultima Genomics, is focused on accelerating progress in AI modeling of biology. Entrants...

virtualcellchallenge.org

The Proto team from @brianhie.bsky.social's lab will be at the re:AGENT hackathon, a two-day weekend (8/15–8/16) in San Francisco for people interested in building AI scientists, datasets, or pipelines for biological design. Apply by Thursday, July 30th at 12 PM PT at luma.com/g6org075

re:AGENT – End to End Agentic Science · Luma

WHAT IS re:AGENT re:AGENT is a two-day build weekend focused on the infrastructure scientific agents still need: better datasets, sharper tools, and reliable…

luma.com

Congrats to Science Fellow Jingtian Zhou and team on their human epigenome atlas, now out in @ScienceMagazine. They show that grouping cells by DNA methylation or chromatin structure yields different subtypes in some lineages but not others: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

Human body single-cell atlas of three-dimensional genome organization and DNA methylation

Higher-order chromatin structure and DNA methylation are critical for gene regulation, but how these vary across the human body remains unclear. We performed multiomic profiling of three-dimensional (...

science.org

Arc Institute@arcinstitute.org · last yr.

New preprint: The first whole-body map of both DNA methylation and 3D genome organization at single-cell resolution across 16 human tissues, with in-depth analyses of cell type diversity of these epigenome modalities at unprecedented resolutions. (1/5)

We are hiring a number of AIxBio positions across the organization, including Directors of Machine Learning for each of our Institute Initiatives and postdoctoral fellows focused on ML for Biology and Biological Design in Patrick Hsu's Lab. Learn more or apply here: arcinstitute.org/jobs

Jobs | Arc Institute

Arc Institute is an independent nonprofit research organization headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

arcinstitute.org

Complex I is the largest complex of the electron transport chain and the entry point for electrons that power ATP production. New work from Core Investigator Isha Jain and team identifies THAP12 as a dedicated transcription factor controlling how much Complex I a cell builds.

Our 3rd Annual Investigator Retreat brought together talks on genome engineering, generative protein models, and computational biology, alongside deep dives into neurodegeneration, immunology, and metabolism.

Today, we welcome Usman Muzaffar as our Chief Technology Officer. At Arc, he'll bring over two decades of engineering leadership, most recently as SVP of Engineering at Cloudflare, to advancing our Virtual Cell Initiative and Arc's broader computational infrastructure.

Effective treatments for mitochondrial disease are scarce. A new paper in Nature Metabolism from Core Investigator Isha Jain and team offers one, showing that breathing low-oxygen air nearly triples lifespan in a mouse model of HTRA2 deficiency.

Cells control gene expression through combinatorial interactions between readers, writers, and erasers of chromatin marks, but most epigenetic editing tools rely on a single effector in isolation. COMBINE is the first platform to test those combinations at scale, screening 50,000+ effector pairs.

Start assembling your team because the 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge officially kicks off on Thursday, August 20. This is round two of our global competition to understand and predict how cells respond to internal cues and external stimuli.

Science Fellow Jingtian Zhou and colleagues traced stress-driven glioma growth in mice to a bone marrow-derived macrophage that infiltrates the brain tumor and acts on the immune environment rather than the tumor cells.

STING agonists can shrink tumors and make them visible to the immune system, but high doses become toxic to T cells. Core Investigator @lingyinli.bsky.social and team have identified SLC7A1, the T cell arginine transporter, as the primary route by which these agonists enter and kill T cells

Congrats to @brianhie.bsky.social, @synbiogaolab.bsky.social, & team on Germinal, now out in NatBiotech. Their pipeline designs epitope-targeted antibodies with nanomolar affinity while testing only tens of designs per target, making antibody design far more accessible. nature.com/articles/s41...

Efficient generation of epitope-targeted antibodies with Germinal - Nature Biotechnology

Germinal achieves epitope-targeted, de novo complementarity-determining region design with high experimental success rates.

nature.com

Arc Institute@arcinstitute.org · 11mo ago

In another preprint from the @brianhie.bsky.social Lab and @synbiogaolab.bsky.social, they introduce Germinal, a generative AI system for de novo antibody design. Germinal produces functional nanobodies in just dozens of tests, making custom antibody design more accessible than ever before.

Imagine programming protein, DNA, and RNA systems like you would write computer code, or even by natural language prompting of an AI agent. @brianhie.bsky.social and team just made this a reality with Proto: a high-level programming language for generative biology.

Arc’s Virtual Cell Initiative focuses on the full-stack development of an accurate AI model to advance complex disease research. Executive Director Silvana Konermann joined TED’s Chris Anderson to talk about what we’re building. www.ted.com/talks/silvan...

The human cell is wildly complex. Can AI decode it?

Silvana Konermann and the team at Arc Institute are trying to crack one of science's most difficult problems: why complex diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer remain so stubbornly unsolvable, even as ...

ted.com

The brain works hard to clear waste, and impairments are central to neurodegeneration. In @cellcellpress.bsky.social, Innovation Investigator Andrew Yang and team map it from the inside out, following the brain's own proteins to see where waste actually goes.

Most spatial CRISPR screens require trade-offs in throughput or readout depth. A new preprint introduces PerturbSpace: spatially resolved, multimodal, whole-transcriptome on standard single-cell workflows.

Introducing the inaugural cohort of the Arc AIxBio Fellows. These five student teams will each tackle an ambitious ML project over the next 6-12 months with a dedicated mentor.

Three years, same spot, a lot more science 🧬

Congratulations to Core Investigator Isha Jain and her team! Their paper is featured on the latest cover of @cellcellpress.bsky.social. They developed a new nutrigenomics framework to systematically identify genetic diseases that are amenable to vitamin-based therapies.

Today in @nature.com, the @genophoria.bsky.social and & Vijay Ramani labs reveal that our picture of how nucleosomes regulate DNA accessibility has been too simple. They find that over 85% of nucleosomes in mammalian cells are structurally distorted, with DNA partially accessible even while wrapped.

By scaling high-quality foundational datasets to train virtual cell models, we can directly accelerate progress against complex diseases. We look forward to working with Biohub and other partner organizations on this effort.

Biohub@biohub.org · 3mo ago

Today we're announcing the Virtual Biology Initiative—a major new commitment to build the data foundation biology needs to power the next generation of AI models. Next-gen imaging. Molecular engineering tools. Open data infrastructure for the entire scientific community. Read more: bit.ly/3ONTkHO

In Nature Review Bioengineering, Core Investigator Felix Horns and colleagues outline how engineered living cells could deliver mRNA to places lipid nanoparticles and viral vectors can't reach, homing to disease sites and activating only when they detect the right signals.

While chemotherapy kills some tumor cells, others survive and can drive relapse. This variability isn't fully explained by DNA mutations. In a new preprint, Core Investigator @genophoria.bsky.social and lab identify RNF8 and MIS18A as drivers of tumor cell variability in breast cancer.

Arc Co-Founder and Executive Director Silvana Konermann discusses what motivates her to use AI to understand complex human disease in this video from The Audacious Project. Learn more about Arc's Virtual Cell Initiative: arcinstitute.org/virtual-cell...

Building the world's first AI-powered "virtual cell" to accelerate drug discovery with Arc Institute

YouTube video by The Audacious Project

youtube.com

mTOR inhibitors stop cancer cells from dividing, but they rarely kill them. New work in Molecular Cell from Luke Gilbert & lab reveals a mechanism connecting mTOR signaling, cholesterol biology, and ferroptosis that could turn growth arrest into cancer cell death.

For decades, we’ve known that the ENPP1 K173Q variant raises type 2 diabetes risk, but not why. New work from @songnanwang.bsky.social in @lingyinli.bsky.social's lab, in collaboration with @svenssonlab.bsky.social, shows that this variant may promote metabolic dysfunction in brown adipose tissue.

Most genomic AI models use fixed rules to process DNA into chunks, imposing arbitrary boundaries on a sequence with its own biological structure. Arnav Shah, Victor Li, and team developed dnaHNet, a tokenizer-free foundation model that learns its own segmentation from scratch.

Over 250 million protein sequences are known, but fewer than 0.1% have confirmed functions. Today, @genophoria.bsky.social, @bowang87.bsky.social & team introduce BioReason-Pro, a multimodal reasoning model that predicts protein function and explains its reasoning like an expert would.

It's been a busy start to 2026 at Arc. We celebrated one year of Evo 2, announced findings from the Jain Lab and Thaiss Lab, and released MULTI-evolve, a new AI framework for designing complex proteins.