Virtual cells - Decoding life's basic units
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The Biorevolution Podcast
Cells are the basic units of life. For over a century, understanding cellular processes has been the basis for understanding human development and disease, and for deciphering the actions of novel disease treatments. But there’s a caveat: wet-lab studies in cells take time and money, they are often reductionist. To overcome those challenges of the wet lab, researchers have for some time tried to model cellular processes mathematically, in so-called virtual cells. With the availability of large-scale datasets and sophisticated AI models, virtual cells are advancing into useful tools for researchers. In episode 41 of the BioRevolution podcast we spoke to Prof. Fabian Theis, Chair of Mathematical Modeling of Biological Systems at TU Munich and director of the Institute of Computational Biology at the Helmholtz Zentrum München. With Fabian we discussed the convergence of mathematics and biology into virtual cell models and their potential use cases in basic research and drug development. You can find more on Fabian's research here: Theis Lab: https://www.helmholtz-munich.de/en/icb/research-groups/theis-lab
Disclaimer: Louise von Stechow & Andreas Horchler and their guests express their personal opinions, which are founded on research on the respective topics, but do not claim to give medical, investment or even life advice in the podcast.
Learn more about the future of biotech in our podcasts and keynotes. Contact us here: scientific communication: https://science-tales.com/ Podcasts: https://www.podcon.de/ Keynotes: https://www.zukunftsinstitut.de/louise-von-stechow
Selected recent publication from the Theis lab: Active learning framework for transcriptomics-based identification of disease phenotypes https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41129612/ Nichformer (2025) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41168487/ Cell Forge (2025) https://arxivexplained.com/papers/cellforge-agentic-design-of-virtual-cell-models https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.02276 Graph neural networks for emergent tissue properties (2025) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40998830/ Self-supervised learning in single-cell genomics (2024) https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-024-00934-3 Integrated Human Lung Cell Atlas (HLCA) (2022) https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2022.03.10.483747v1 Additional research projects and publications here: https://www.helmholtz-munich.de/en/icb/research-groups/theis-lab#c25369
Additional background info:
- https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02011-0
- https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(24)01332-1
- https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11356281/
- https://www.humancellatlas.org
- https://arcinstitute.org/news/virtual-cell-model-state
- https://arcinstitute.org/news/arc-vevo
- https://thisweekinai.news/2025/08/21/chan-zuckerberg-initiatives-rbio-uses-virtual-cells-to-coach-ai-bypassing-lab-work/
- https://chanzuckerberg.com/newsroom/billion-cells-project-launches-advance-ai-biology/
- https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.09775
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