Biohub, a nonprofit research institute combining AI and biology, the US Department of Energy (DoE), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and new funding partners, Google DeepMind, Meta (the parent company of Facebook), and Isomorphic Labs, a London-based AI-enabled drug design and development company, have committed a combined $1.8 billion to build foundational data for AI models to predict and treat disease. The funding will be used for data, computation, and new measurement technology to generate AI-ready biological data to provide an open resource for the research community to provide the foundation for greater understanding and treatment of human diseases. 

Biohub has partnered with the DoE’s Office of Science and NIH to advance AI in biology. DoE will invest more than $500 million over five years (as reported on October 7, 2026) in lab measurement, modeling, and computation toward the international effort to build an AI-ready open data resource. NIH will coordinate the contribution of relevant datasets, repositories, and knowledge bases developed through more than $500 million in prior federal investment aligned to this initiative in the form of DoE’s broader AI initiative, Genesis Mission. Biohub will work with NIH to standardize these datasets for AI model training.  

In addition, Google DeepMind, Meta, and Isomorphic Labs, are collectively investing $300 million in the Virtual Biology Initiative to create the technologies and multi-modal datasets needed to build predictive models of life. 

These datasets will enable the global scientific community to collectively build and use AI models that allow researchers to ask, predict, and answer biological questions digitally to accelerate the path to new ways of preventing and treating diseases. This initiative will deliver the foundational measurements to train these models, expanding cell response data to interventions across more cell types and conditions than have yet been studied, and building and validating technologies for studying cells and cellular interactions at greater scale, speed, and accuracy. 

The Virtual Biology Initiative, announced in April 2026, will coordinate data generation across institutions and disciplines to build AI-ready open datasets to enable predictive models of life. Biohub’s initial $500-million commitment supports that work: $400 million for new technologies that expand what biologists can measure: cryo-electron tomography, which resolves near-atomic detail inside the cell; microscopy that can image millions to billions of cells in living tissue; and engineering tools to build and perturb biology at molecular, cellular, tissue, and whole-organism levels. A further $100 million funds research outside Biohub.  

The Genesis Mission is a cross-agency initiative led by the DoE, in which DoE is contributing more than $500 million over five years in fundamental cell research — data collection, AI analytics, measurement and imaging, modeling, and computation — drawing on exascale supercomputing, X-ray and neutron scattering, cryo-electron microscopy and tomography, and autonomous laboratories across the National Laboratory system. 

Source: Biohub