NVIDIA and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Collaboration Scales Virtual Cell

At NVIDIA GTC in Washington DC, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) and NVIDIA announced an expanded collaboration to drive the development and adoption of virtual cell models through tools, data, models, and benchmarks delivered through CZI’s virtual cells platform (VCP). The new resources announced as part of the expanded collaboration include, scaling data processing, accelerating model development, and increasing access to AI models and data through CZI’s VCP.

“By supporting CZI’s efforts to create open, community-driven resources, we are helping to ensure that these powerful tools can be used by scientists everywhere to solve some of the most complex challenges in medicine,” said Rory Kelleher, senior director and global head of business development for life sciences at NVIDIA, in a public release. 

“We see NVIDIA’s playing a key role not just in making models robust in infrastructure, but also ensuring that they can be accessed and used by the broader community,” said Patricia Brennan, vice president of Science Technology at CZI. 

Generation and harmonization of large biological datasets continue to be a bottleneck for AI applications in life sciences. To address this gap, CZI announced the Billion Cells Project in February, a collaboration with 10x Genomics and Ultima Genomics to generate an unprecedented one billion cell dataset that maps genetic perturbations across diverse cell types and tissues to assist AI model performance across new biological contexts. 

CZI and NVIDIA will scale biological data processing for virtual cell model development and create robust data platforms to support large-scale data publishing, exploration, and ecosystem development to increase the scale and breadth of data available to the scientific community.

CZI’s VCP is an open-source platform that facilitates access to data, models, and AI-powered biological analysis tools built by CZI for the broader scientific community. Among the virtual cell models developed by CZI include, rBio, GREmLN, and TranscriptFormer. The collaboration with NVIDIA will increase the scale and scope of their virtual cell models across multiple scales of biology. In addition, NVIDIA Clara Open Models, MONAI-based imaging models and CodonFM, an RNA foundation model, will be offered on the platform for the first time. 

“Our collaboration with NVIDIA is a significant step forward in our mission to harness the power of AI for biological discovery,” said Ram Balasubramanian, VP of science technology at CZI in a public release. “By combining our expertise in biological data generation and model development with NVIDIA’s leadership in accelerated computing, we can provide researchers with the infrastructure and tools they need to make novel discoveries about human biology and ultimately solve disease.”