The CZI initiative, founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, has announced funding and construction for one of the largest computing systems in the world dedicated to non-profit life sciences research.
Led by the couple, this new effort aims to provide the scientific community with access to predictive models of healthy and diseased cells, potentially leading to groundbreaking discoveries that could help treat, prevent, or control all diseases by the end of this year.
The high-performance computing cloud, expected to house over 1000 graphical processing units, will apply artificial intelligence and large language models extensively in the field of biomedical research.
Mark Zuckerberg stated, "Artificial intelligence creates new opportunities in biomedicine, and building a high-performance computing cloud dedicated to life sciences will accelerate progress in important scientific questions about how our cells function."
The increasing complexity and accessibility of scientific datasets, coupled with the rapid advancements in AI and machine learning, present a unique opportunity to apply these developments in large language models (LLMs) to biomedicine.
AI systems like AlphaFold and ESM, focused on studying human DNA and genomes, have already made significant contributions to human biology research by catalyzing their adoption in life sciences.
Chan noted, "Bringing generative artificial intelligence power to biology on a wide scale will allow researchers to integrate these technological advances into their work, speeding up efforts to treat, prevent, or control all diseases."
"AI models can predict how the immune cell responds to infection, what happens at the cellular level when a child is born with a rare disease, or even how a patient's body responds to a new drug," added the Co-Founder and Co-CEO of CZI. "We hope this collaborative effort will generate new knowledge about the fundamental properties of our cells."
The intended technology will be trained using data like that integrated into Priscilla Chan's CELL by GENE tool (CZ CELLxGENE), boasting the largest collection of unified single-cell datasets, with over 50 million cells.
Projects like CELLxGENE have already proven highly valuable in accelerating single-cell research, with nearly 75% of the data coming from researchers outside CZI who contribute to the development of this dataset. Patricia Brennan, Deputy Head of Scientific Technology at CZI, stated, "Through these new cellular models powered by artificial intelligence, we hope to create shared cooperative resources that drive future progress."
Current AI applications developed by the Science and Technology team at CZI include CellGuide, an interactive encyclopedia with definitions generated by ChatGPT, providing researchers with quick access to fundamental information about over 700 cell types and subtypes, including definitions, key marker genes, and lineage trees, along with related datasets.
CZI's Institutes of Science bring together multidisciplinary researchers to tackle scientific challenges. In 2022, leaders in science, technology, and artificial intelligence launched the Combiner Institute for the Study of Natural and Artificial Intelligence at Harvard University, where researchers study the foundations of intelligence in natural and artificial systems.
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