Biohub, Google DeepMind, and US Government Unite on $1.8 Billion Virtual Cell Initiative

The Chan Zuckerberg Biohub, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, Meta, and the U.S. Department of Energy announced October 7, 2026, a $1.8 billion collaborative effort to build artificial intelligence models that simulate living cells—a milestone effort to predict how cells respond to drugs, mutations, and disease. The initiative represents what proponents describe as the beginning of a new scientific paradigm in computational biology, combining decades of accumulated biological data with large multimodal AI systems to accelerate drug discovery and disease understanding.