Patrick Collison
The 2026 @arcinstitute Virtual Cell Challenge just launched. The grand prize is $100,000, sponsored by @NVIDIA, @10xGenomics, and @UltimaGenomics. There's a lot of interest in virtual cells these days: ML models of cells that can complement wet lab experiments. (You'll always need the wet lab to validate results, of course. But ML models can in principle search far more efficiently.) A practical challenge in the field is that benchmarking is quite difficult: cells are very complicated, and it's not a priori obvious how to compare two different models. So, inspired by the CASP protein folding contest, we're running the Virtual Cell Challenge to create a standardized way for teams around the world to compare the efficacy of different approaches, to spread awareness of what works, and ultimately -- we hope -- to support faster progress overall. https://arcinstitute.org/news/virtual-cell-challenge-2026