On Apr. 29, 2026, Biohub announced the Virtual Biology Initiative, a landmark five-year initiative to galvanize a global effort to create the technologies and multi-modal datasets needed to build predictive models of life. Biohub is committing $500 million to anchor the effort: $100 million to help nucleate a coordinated, worldwide data-generation effort beyond what any individual institution could undertake alone, and $400 million to generate data at scale and develop next-generation technologies for measuring, imaging, and engineering biology.

For the first time, it is becoming possible to envision a high-accuracy predictive model of the cell. The scientific and technological foundations exist, but achieving this goal will require orders of magnitude more data than is currently available. Generating these data will require significant, coordinated effort involving leading institutions and funders joining forces. Biohub is committing resources to support this effort: large-scale compute power, cutting-edge technologies for instrumenting, imaging, and programming biology, and frontier biological and AI science. Biohub will make the data it generates open and freely available as a resource for the worldwide scientific community.

Several other institutions are coming together with Biohub, including the Allen Institute, Arc Institute, Broad Institute, and Wellcome Sanger Institute, as well as consortia including the Human Cell Atlas and the Human Protein Atlas, to coordinate a larger scale effort. These groups are committed to working together, through coordinated and independent efforts, toward this shared goal. 

As a key technology partner, NVIDIA will support the initiative to leverage accelerated computing infrastructure, domain-specific software, and technical expertise, enabling Biohub and its ecosystem of collaborators to generate, process, and analyze large-scale datasets to ultimately train and deploy impactful models for biology. Renaissance Philanthropy is joining this effort to catalyze the expansion of funding for data generation. Additional funders, research institutions, and partners are expected to participate in these expansion efforts.

A much larger global effort will be needed to reach the necessary scale. To help jump start a coordinated global effort, Biohub is committing $100 million to fund external research that will anchor a field-wide data generation effort and advance the frontiers of experimental technology. In doing so, Biohub’s Virtual Biology Initiative will build on its longstanding support of the global community working on single-cell biology. Biohub will also contribute engineering and data infrastructure to support the project and build the data foundation it requires.

Leading institutions and international consortia (see below) are working together to align their respective initiatives to generate proteomic, genomic, transcriptomic, cellular, and tissue-level data and develop algorithms and models—as part of a broader shared global effort. The effort will advance large-scale open data resources for AI-powered biological research and enable deeper understanding of cellular programs in health and disease.

Biohub is a 501(c)(3) biomedical research organization building the first large-scale initiative to combine frontier AI and frontier biology to solve disease. With its compute capacity, AI research and engineering, and state-of-the-art technology for measuring, imaging, and programming biology, Biohub is enabling scientists worldwide to use AI-powered biology to study how cells operate and organize as systems — ultimately understanding why disease happens and how to cure or prevent it.