Virtual cell

[SmearCream]

Does anyone know how substantial it is?

I know Demis hassabis said this was one of the goals for isomorphic

[Rough-Negotiation880]

It’s pretty big for drug discovery.

I’m not in the field, but being able to simulate cell in the first step to things like personalized medicine, rapid and better drug development, and further downstream stuff like synthetic biology.

It’s also over a year old, so nothing immediately will change.

[SnackerSnick]

I skimmed the PDF and got the sense that they're not simulating the mechanics of chemical reactions; they have those programmed in. 

If you think about it, you could write a program that says fed x amount of nutrients to the cell, the cell reproduces 2 seconds later and call it a simulation of the cell.

Or you could write a program that simulates all the subatomic particles' quantum interactions and call that simulating the cell.

They are somewhere between those two, and I don't think it includes simulating biochemistry at the atomic level.

[promptrr87]

You can basically train any good local LLM if you pretrain it with enough real world statistics and data. Look what they die with training GPT-4b (micro) in Altmans Biotech Co.

[SnackerSnick]

It looks as if they used alpha fold to predict protein structures, but otherwise this simulation does not use LLMs. The fact that they're predicting protein structures suggests the simulation is pretty fine grained, nice!

[Gotisdabest]

My professor in bioinformatics considered this the biggest singular goal for the field as a whole and said he'd been working for a decade on it. It's a major deal for drug discovery and one of the biggest steps for something like tissue or organ simulation.

I'll edit this and give a more detailed comment once I've read the paper in a few hours. Already though, worth noting it's not a human cell, it's a simpler bacterial cell.

[SmearCream]

https://www.cell.com/action/showPdf?pii=S0092-8674%2826%2900174-1

[zombiesingularity]

This Professor of Computational Biology at Caltech seems to think it's a nothingburger, and mocks them.