Biohub, a US research organization backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, said on October 7 that support from the US government and tech companies brought total investment in its AI biology dataset effort to US$1.8 billion.

Meta, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs, a UK-based AI drug discovery startup, will jointly invest US$300 million.

The US Department of Energy will invest more than US$500 million over five years.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) will coordinate datasets and repositories built with more than US$500 million in earlier federal funding. The total also includes Biohub’s US$500 million commitment made in April.

Biohub’s Virtual Biology Initiative aims to measure how cells respond across many conditions and use that data to train predictive models for biological research.

Corporate funders will get temporary exclusive access before the datasets are released publicly, while government-funded work will have no such restrictions. Biohub expects a first dataset in about a year.

Separately, NIH’s Bridge2AI program includes biomedical datasets for AI. Isomorphic Labs says it is applying AI to drug discovery, while Google DeepMind has outlined bioresilience work.

🔗 Source: Reuters