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 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.

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...

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.

Arc Co-Founder and Executive Director Silvana Konermann is speaking at TED2026 in Vancouver (April 13-17). She'll be sharing her vision for Arc's Virtual Cell Initiative, recently announced as part of The Audacious Project's 2025 cohort, on one of the world's biggest stages.

A protein that stabilizes cancer-suppressing mRNAs turns out to be a key brake on breast cancer metastasis. A paper from Core Investigator @genophoria.bsky.social and lab in Science Advances traces the mechanism to RNA decay and an RNA-binding protein most studies have overlooked.

Today in @nature.com, the @christophthaiss.bsky.social & @maayanlevy.bsky.social labs trace age-related memory loss to the gastrointestinal tract & map the complete gut-to-brain pathway driving it. Targeting this pathway can reverse cognitive aging in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

CAR T cell therapy has shown strong results against certain cancers, but metabolic exhaustion limits its effectiveness over time. In Cell, the @maayanlevy.bsky.social & @christophthaiss.bsky.social labs report that a common supplement can fuel CAR T cells to fight cancer more effectively.

Evo 2, the largest fully open biological AI model to date, is now published in @nature.com youtu.be/o_w-E--u7GQ

This new review from Core Investigator @christophthaiss.bsky.social & Innovation Investigator @maayanlevy.bsky.social maps how gut metabolites shape diseases from IBD to cancer, and lays out a framework for using them as therapies.

Congratulations to Arc Innovation Investigator Theo Roth on receiving a 2026 Michelson Medical Research Foundation Next Generation Grant. Theo's team is using combinatorial genetic engineering to create immune cell states not found in nature. www.michelsonmedicalresearch.org/news/michels...

Most drug discovery starts with a disease & searches for a cure. New research out in Cell from Arc investigator Isha Jain’s lab flips this model, starting with a potential cure (vitamins) & systematically identifying which diseases it could treat.

We're honored to be named a grantee in The Audacious Project's 2025 cohort, supporting our Virtual Cell Initiative.

A reminder that applications close Friday, Feb 27 for the Arc AIxBio Fellows Program. Undergrads: propose and run your own AI + biology research project over 6–12 months, with mentorship from Arc scientists. Apply solo or as a team of 2–3. arcinstitute.org/programs/aix...

Finding one mutation that improves a protein is hard. Finding five that work together is exponentially harder. Today in @science.org, Hsu and Konermann labs present MULTI-evolve, a lab-in-the-loop framework that does it in just one machine learning-guided round.

Most genetic interaction studies measure gene relationships in one condition, but environment can reshape which genes depend on each other. Today in Molecular Cell, Luke Gilbert & team deliver the first systematic, multi-condition map of genetic rewiring in human cells.

People living at high altitude have better glucose tolerance & lower diabetes risk, but the mechanism behind why has remained a mystery. New research out in Cell Metabolism from Isha Jain's lab reveals an unexpected answer—red blood cells.

Congratulations to Core Investigator @christophthaiss.bsky.social on being named a 2026 @sloanfoundation.bsky.social Research Fellow. He is one of 126 early-career scientists recognized for extraordinary promise and the potential to reshape their fields: sloan.org/fellowships/...

In this Molecular Cell Voices piece, @genophoria.bsky.social comments on how he thinks about bridging bench and computational work: www.cell.com/molecular-ce...

A new paper from the Patrick Hsu and Silvana Konermann labs introduces RESPLICE, a dual CRISPR system that rewrites cellular transcripts by splicing new exons directly onto target mRNAs.

"Instead of designing experiments by hand, we're going to have AI models design the experiments for us and help us troubleshoot and decide what to do next." Patrick Hsu talks about integrating AI models and biological research with Jacob Goldstein: www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/wha...

An amazing day for science at the 2nd Annual Arc Symposium! Thank you to everyone who joined us from our labs, technology centers, partner universities, and beyond. We are so grateful that you're part of our community.

We're launching the Arc AIxBio Fellows Program to support the next generation of researchers working at the interface of AI and biology. Teams of 2-3 undergrads propose and execute their own research projects over 6-12 months with Arc mentors. arcinstitute.org/news/aixbio-...

In a new review published in @cp-neuron.bsky.social, @christophthaiss.bsky.social and team synthesize emerging research on intestinal interoception, highlighting how signals from the gut shape communication between the environment, the body, and the brain to maintain human health.

It's an exciting time to be at Arc. We recently welcomed a new CSO, announced a major partnership with Tahoe Therapeutics and Biohub, and are continuing to open source models and techniques to push forward progress on virtual cells.

A new paper from Jeffrey Wang, @genophoria.bsky.social, and team describes orphan non-coding RNAs, known as "oncRNAs," as cancer-emergent molecules with important roles in tumor identity and progression, and clinical monitoring across human cancers: www.cell.com/cell-reports...

Today I’m happy to release cyto, a tool I’ve developed at @arcinstitute.org to dramatically increase our computational throughput with 10x-flex single-cell processing by more than 16X!

Arc bioinformatics scientists @noamteyssier.bsky.social and Alex Dobin have just released cyto, an ultra-high throughput processor specifically optimized for @10xgenomics.bsky.social Flex single-cell data. We are excited to make this resource open source: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The next inflection point in virtual cell modeling will require large-scale perturbative data. To get there we are partnering with @tahoetherapeutics.bsky.social and @biohub.org to help us generate a dataset to push us forward: arcinstitute.org/news/tahoe-a...

Predicting cell state in previously unseen conditions has typically required retraining for each new biological context. Today, Arc is releasing Stack, a foundation model that learns to simulate cell state under novel conditions directly at inference time, no fine-tuning required.

Today, we welcome Megan van Overbeek as our first Chief Scientific Officer. At Arc, she'll drive the discovery of novel therapeutic strategies for complex diseases, bringing expertise that bridges fundamental research with therapeutic development.

Arc’s Science Fellows program gives a springboard to recent PhD and/or MD students to become a PI right out of grad school. Interested? Apply by Jan 12 or hear from our team and current Fellows Jingtian Zhou, Uche Medoh, and @mayaarce.bsky.social in this video: youtu.be/3Qs5cmXxsWQ

Altos Labs has taken home the Generalist Prize for the most "well-rounded" model across metrics at @arcinstitute.org's Virtual Cell Challenge! The competition highlights the challenge of defining robust benchmarks for biology. #NeurIPS2025 Read at GEN: www.genengnews.com/topics/artif...

Congratulations to the winners of the @arcinstitute.org Virtual Cell Challenge using 10x Genomics GEM-X Flex technology. Ready to build your own? http://virtualcellchallenge.org/ #VirtualCellChallenge #AI

Thank you to everyone who made the inaugural Virtual Cell Challenge a success. Over 5,000 participants from 114 countries competed to build AI models that predict cellular responses to genetic perturbations. Today we're announcing the winners and reflecting on what we learned.

A preprint out today from Arc Innovation Investigator Theo Roth, Austin Hartman, Oliver Takacsi-Nagy, and colleagues introduces CRISPR All–a unified programming language for editing human cells across all major genetic perturbation types at once.

Published today in @nature.com, @adititm.bsky.social & researchers from the @brianhie.bsky.social lab report that the large-scale genomic model, Evo, is capable of using surrounding genomic context to produce novel, functional genes, enabling an an emergent approach they've termed 'semantic design'.

Congratulations to Arc Science Fellow, @uchemedoh.bsky.social, on being named a winner of the 2025 @science.org & @scilifelab.se Prize for Young Scientists! His work solves a decades-old mystery in cell biology, revealing the enzyme responsible for BMP synthesis: www.aaas.org/news/researc...