Palo Alto-based GenBio AI has unveiled AIDO Cell, a virtual cell model designed to simulate biological responses across multiple scales, from DNA and RNA through proteins to whole-cell behavior. The company is positioning the system as a step beyond cellular foundation models centered primarily on transcriptomic data, with an architecture that can model cascading effects across biological layers and retain the cumulative impact of sequential perturbations.
AIDO Cell's key distinction, according to GenBio, is that it is both multiscale and stateful. Earlier cellular foundation models such as Geneformer and scGPT have largely focused on representations derived from single-cell transcriptomic data. GenBio said AIDO Cell instead links DNA, RNA, protein, and cellular representations within a single simulation, allowing a perturbation at one level — such as a genetic alteration or drug treatment — to propagate through the modeled biological hierarchy. The system also retains changes caused by previous perturbations, enabling researchers to model sequences of interventions rather than treating each independently.
As an initial proof-of-concept, GenBio said AIDO Cell reproduced the known mechanism of imatinib in K562 leukemia cells, tracing the effects of treatment across its modeled cellular environment. The company did not disclose quantitative performance metrics, comparisons with competing models, statistical analyses, or prospective experimental validation, making it difficult to assess how accurately the system predicts previously unseen biological responses. AIDO Cell currently supports K562 and HepG2 cell lines, with additional cell types in development.
The new system builds on GenBio's earlier AIDO.Cell-100M, a 100-million-parameter transcriptomic foundation model trained on approximately 50 million cells and available through the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's Virtual Cells Platform. AIDO Cell extends that work toward an integrated simulation spanning multiple biological scales rather than operating primarily on transcriptomic representations.
GenBio was founded by a group of researchers spanning artificial intelligence, computational biology, and protein science. Its co-founders include 2024 Nobel chemistry laureate David Baker, director of the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington; Eric Xing, president and university professor at Mohamed Bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) and professor at Carnegie Mellon University; Carnegie Mellon computational biologist Ziv Bar-Joseph; Stanford and KTH Royal Institute of Technology researcher Emma Lundberg; and former BioMap chief technology officer Le Song. Fred Hu, founder of Primavera Capital Group, serves as GenBio's CEO.