Controlling Biology - Fabian Theis, Helmholtz Munich

This piece discusses Fabian Theis's work on algorithms for multi-scale, multi-modal, time-varying biological data and the Virtual Cell concept, alongside the recent $1.8B Biohub commitment from Biohub, NIH, DOE, Google and Meta. It notes that the 2025 Arc Virtual Cell Challenge showed constant baselines often beating sophisticated perturbation-prediction models, though a cited paper argues better-calibrated metrics let deep learning outperform the mean baseline. Theis argues perturbation prediction on existing datasets isn't hard enough to warrant complex algorithms, and that focus should shift to large, high-precision, co-registered data spanning molecules through organisms.