Google DeepMind, Meta, and Isomorphic Labs Invest $300 Million in Biohub’s Virtual Cell Project
The $300 million investment is part of a $1.8 billion effort to build AI datasets for a “virtual cell” that simulates biology digitally. The Energy Department will add over $500 million over five years, alongside NIH datasets tied to more than $500 million in prior federal investment.
Google DeepMind, Meta, and AI drug discovery startup Isomorphic Labs are jointly investing $300 million into Biohub, the nonprofit biomedical research organization founded by Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, according to a Reuters report published in October 2026.
The investment is part of a broader $1.8 billion initiative aimed at building AI datasets that could allow researchers to “ask, predict, and answer biological questions digitally,” with the goal of finding new ways to prevent and manage diseases.
Founded in 2016, Biohub is working toward the creation of a “virtual cell” — a digital model that researchers can use to run biological simulations. Additional funding for the effort includes more than $500 million from the US Department of Energy over the next five years, as well as datasets, repositories, and knowledge bases from the National Institutes of Health, representing over $500 million in previous federal investment.
Alex Rives, Biohub’s head of science, described the scope of the challenge in a press release: “An accurate predictive model of biology could dramatically accelerate scientific discovery by enabling scientists to perform experiments digitally. The creation of a virtual cell is one of the most important challenges for the next era of science. It will require coordinated data generation efforts at a national and international scale, which is why these partners are coming together.”
If successful, a working virtual cell could reduce the need for physical experiments in early-stage research, potentially speeding up the discovery and development of treatments for a range of diseases. The scale of the combined public and private funding — totaling $1.8 billion — suggests the effort is being treated as a significant long-term scientific undertaking.