Charlotte Bunne

The Holy Grail of Biology Towards the Virtual Cell with Steve Quake and Charlotte Bunne

Could AI enable the next big breakthrough in biology? 🔬

@bunnech.bsky.social & @stephenquake.bsky.social present the Artificial Intelligence Virtual Cell, a bold project transforming how we study life at the cellular level.

Listen here👉 erictopol.substack.com/p/the-holy-g...
#AI4Science #AI4Health

<br/>Online workshop - Generative AI for Biology — gen ai Online registration for hybrid workshop on 12 May looking at the development of generative models for large and high-resolution biological datasets.

Hybrid workshop on Generative AI for Biology with great speakers including Sarah Teichmann, @bunnech.bsky.social, Francesco Di Giovanni, Diego Oyarzun, Jussi Taipale, @jhartford.bsky.social, Chris Barnes and Marta Milo. Link for online registration www.genai.ac.uk/news-feed/ce...

Self-driving laboratories, advanced immunotherapies and five more technologies to watch in 2025 Sustainability and artificial intelligence dominate our seventh annual round-up of exciting innovations.

I spoke with @natureportfolio.bsky.social about the transformative potential of foundation models for biology—particularly in personalized medicine & clinical diagnostics.
Take a look at the technologies to watch in 2025. An exciting year ahead for AI & biomedicine!

www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Read the full paper: arxiv.org/pdf/2501.060...

Would love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to reach out with questions.

This was a fantastic collaboration between researchers at @icepfl.bsky.social, @epfl-ai-center.bsky.social, the and University Hospital Zurich with co-authors Gabriele Gut , Andreas Wicki, Kiril Vasilev and Matteo Pariset! This is just the beginning - we’re excited of what is coming next!

🔎How?
VirTues is built on a novel vision transformer architecture that efficiently processes high-dimensional data and flexible numbers of input channels while maintaining biological interpretability.

💡Why now?
Spatial proteomics has just been announced ‘Method of the Year’ by @naturemethods.bsky.social due to its critical role in #clinical #diagnostics and #computational #pathology. VirTues is the first AI model that can handle the complexity and unique requirements of multiplex images

• Handle varying combinations of hundreds of protein markers without retraining.
• Provide interpretable insights from molecular to tissue scales through its multi-scale design and novel attention.
• Support clinical decisions through case retrieval and the creation.

🧬Our work tackles a key challenge in precision medicine: making sense of highly multiplexed tissue imaging data that captures dozens of molecular markers simultaneously. VirTues can:
• Provide zero-shot virtual tissue representations across cancer types and diseases.

Led by PhD students wencksternjo.bsky.social and @eeshaanjain.bsky.social, we introduce the Virtual Tissues platform (VirTues), a foundation model framework for analyzing complex tissue architectures.

✨Excited to share our work on “AI-powered virtual tissues from spatial proteomics for clinical diagnostics and biomedical discovery” (arxiv.org/pdf/2501.060...), building on our vision paper in @cellpress.bsky.social on multi-scale, multi-modal foundation models (shorturl.at/G2Dew).

Exciting news! 🚀 The Learning Meaningful Representations of Life ( #LMRL 🌟) workshop is returning at #ICLR2025! 🎉

On 27th / 28th April 2025 in Singapore 🇸🇬, this popular event returns with a fresh organizing team 👇 & bold new ideas 🧠 to explore bridging AI & life sciences 🧬

The slides of my NeurIPS lecture "From Diffusion Models to Schrödinger Bridges - Generative Modeling meets Optimal Transport" can be found here
drive.google.com/file/d/1eLa3...

Bunne Lab - Artificial Intelligence in Molecular Medicine Led by Charlotte Bunne in EPFL's Computer Science and Life Sciences departments, our research aims to advance personalized medicine by utilizing machine learning and large-scale biomedical data.

Building Al virtual cells is no small feat!
With a massive scientific undertaking and shared goals, we posit that a comprehensive understanding of cellular mechanisms is within reach.

Stay tuned for exciting research coming out soon and consider joining my lab @icepfl.bsky.social!

aimm.epfl.ch

... integrates extensive community discussions, resulting in an author list consisting of key leaders across different fields of Al and biology from
@genentech.bsky.social, @chanzuckerberg.bsky.social ,
@msftresearch.bsky.social, @broadinstitute.org, @arcinstitute.org, @embl.org and more!

Our work with @yusufroohani.bsky.social, @yanayrosen.bsky.social, Theofanis Karaletsos, Aviv Regev, Emma Lundberg, Jure Leskovec, Stephen Quake ...

How can we build an Al virtual cell that simulates all functions and interactions of a cell? How will it transform research and drive breakthroughs in programmable biology, drug discovery and personalized medicine?

Take a look at our paper in @cellpress.bsky.social!
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex...

Towards the #AI virtual cell, which would represent one the most extraordinary achievements in life science
www.cell.com/cell/fulltex... @bunnech.bsky.social