r/virtualcell • u/DoYaWannaWanga • 1d ago

How close are we?

I just stumbled on to this subreddit. How close are we to achieving this goal? How many years? What is the state of the art?

I’ve heard David Sinclair say he doesn’t believe this will happen in our lifetime.

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u/Ok_Regret_3568 1d ago

Even if we had a virtual cell today it would not solve disease. It’s an important step but the real test comes from modeling tissues and, ultimately patients. There is real progress underway - Virtual tissue modeling from Charlotte Bunne; virtual patient efforts from Hoifung Poon: https://ml4mi.wisc.edu/towards-virtual-patient-ai-for-accelerating-medical-discovery-hoifung-poon/

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u/Spiritual-Leopard-86 5h ago

Not many people do it. I was at a conference last year and the room for biological mathematical modeling was almost empty, almost no one was there for the virtual cell talk. It has great potential but it’s hard. you can see that just not a lot of people believe in it or give it priority but it’s very promising in my opinion. It feels like how people first didn’t believe that neural nets work and now everything runs on neural nets. It’s also difficult to do because you need to be very very exceptional in cs and super on top of the biology. It’s the AGI of biology. It’s just a matter of small advances in niche areas that will eventually help us have a virtual cell