The UAE's embassy in Washington on Wednesday highlighted the development of an artificial intelligence model that can simulate a human cell and its response to drugs.
The embassy praised the work of California-based GenBio AI, along with researchers from Abu Dhabi's Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, Harvard and Stanhope.
GenBio AI, co-founded by Eric Xing, president of the MBZUAI, and Nobel Laureate David Baker, first announced the system that it calls AIDO Cell in late August.
"AIDO Cell simulates how a cell would change in response to experiments, and how those changes appear across various experimental measurements, i.e., a virtual cell," a statement from GenBio AI reads. It adds that AIDO Cell is based on a "world model".
"World models are unique in that they perform predictions on a unified world state, allowing users to take actions midway through a prediction and decode how observations in the real world would unfold in response to those actions."
A video provided by the company says that biologists largely rely on laboratory experiments to better understand how cells behave, but now, with the help of AIDO Cell, they can simulate the same biology for many of those experiments using software.
GenBio AI's website provides an opportunity for those interested in using AIDO Cell to sign up for an early access waiting list.
The company says that it is working on a full virtual cell bank so that researchers can eventually download custom cells and "run open-ended experiments on them".
GenBio AI, which also has offices in Abu Dhabi and Paris, said it is actively looking for partnerships that would hasten the process of building that cell bank.
"We are far from solving cell biology but we have built a system that can be interrogated as though it were a cell," the AI biotechnology company's website reads.
"It ingests many different types of multimodal data into a single shared world model, and that improves as it observes new biological contexts."
Mr Xing said that AIDO Cell was a step forward in improving the world.
"To truly understand life, we must model and simulate it across every scale," he said. "GenBio AI's world model is our path toward a future where biology becomes computable, predictable, and ultimately programmable."
