Biohub, DOE and NIH commit $1.8 billion to open data for AI models of cells

Biohub, the US Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) announced on 7 October 2026 an expansion of the Virtual Biology Initiative, with $1.8 billion committed in funding, data, computation and measurement technology to produce biological data for training predictive AI models ¹. Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta are together contributing $300 million ¹.

What was committed

The partners describe the package as the largest coordinated commitment so far to generating AI-ready biological data, and say the output will be an open resource for researchers ¹. The money and assets break down as follows ¹:

• DOE will put more than $500 million over five years into lab measurement, modelling and computation, through its cross-agency Genesis Mission, drawing on national laboratory supercomputing, X-ray and neutron scattering, cryo-electron microscopy and autonomous laboratories ¹.

• NIH will coordinate datasets, repositories and knowledge bases built with more than $500 million of earlier federal spending, and Biohub will work with NIH to standardise them for model training ¹.

• Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs and Meta are investing $300 million between them in technologies and multi-modal datasets ¹.

• Biohub's founding $500 million, set when the initiative launched in April 2026, splits into $400 million for new measurement technologies and $100 million for research outside Biohub ¹.

The data work centres on how cells respond to interventions, across many more cell types and conditions than have been studied to date, along with tools to study cells and their interactions faster and at larger scale ¹. Biohub names cryo-electron tomography and microscopy able to image millions to billions of cells in living tissue among the technologies it is funding ¹. The Allen Institute, Broad Institute, Gladstone Institutes, the Human Cell Atlas, the Human Protein Atlas and the Wellcome Sanger Institute have joined to help organise the scientific community, NVIDIA will supply computing infrastructure, software and technical support, and Renaissance Philanthropy is helping widen funding for data generation ¹.

Isomorphic Labs says it is a founding member of the effort ². Its president, Max Jaderberg, said the initiative "will generate the data needed to push the industry closer to the next significant breakthrough for biology" ¹.

What it means for the market

For pharma and biotech R&D teams, the practical change is the prospect of a large, standardised public dataset on cellular responses to perturbation ¹. Biohub says it is building a shared layer of standards, common identifiers and a single point of access so that partners' datasets can be used together ¹.

The presence of Isomorphic Labs alongside Google DeepMind and Meta means commercial AI developers are paying into a resource that will be open to the research community ¹. NIH's Nicole Kleinstreuer said the aim is "universal cell models with sufficient biological complexity to predict how any cell responds to an intervention" ¹. For AI vendors selling virtual cell or perturbation-prediction platforms to pharma, an open public resource on this scale raises the question of how much advantage proprietary data will keep, and the announcement does not say what licence terms will apply to commercial use ¹.

The package is mostly a US public and philanthropic effort, with the Wellcome Sanger Institute the one named UK participant ¹. The release does not say how European or UK funders, or pharma companies themselves, will take part beyond inviting the worldwide scientific community to join ¹.

Caveats

The figures combine new cash with in-kind contributions: NIH's share is existing data from past federal spending rather than new money, and DOE's share includes computing and facility time ¹. The announcement comes from the partners themselves and gives no timetable for when the first datasets will be released or how much each private funder is contributing individually ¹. The only stated period is DOE's five-year commitment ¹.