The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and Biohub signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to advance the frontier of Super Intelligence (SI) in biology, deepen our understanding of human health and disease, and accelerate breakthroughs in medicine and biotechnology.  

The partnership brings together the computational powerhouse and biological expertise of DOE’s National Laboratories, Biohub’s SI technologies and biomedical research infrastructure, and NIH’s extensive health data, imaging resources, and research enterprise to build an open biological data foundation for predictive models of living systems and accurately predict how cells respond to various interventions.  

"Advancing Super Intelligence in biology represents a critical step forward in leveraging new technologies for public benefit," said DOE Under Secretary for Science Darío Gil. "By uniting the capabilities and expertise of DOE’s National Laboratories with philanthropic and scientific leadership, we are setting a new standard for open, data-driven science, accelerating discoveries, and solidifying American leadership in SI-driven biotechnology." 

DOE is investing more than $500 million over five years in fundamental cell research spanning data collection, SI analytics, laboratory measurement and imaging, modeling, and computation. Complementing this effort, Biohub is investing $500 million over five years in the Virtual Biology Initiative (VBI), a global effort to develop technologies and multi-modal datasets for predictive models of life. 

“An accurate predictive model of biology could dramatically accelerate scientific discovery by enabling scientists to perform experiments digitally. The insights that come from this could unlock a far greater understanding of disease and open up completely new paths for cures,” said Biohub Head of Science, Alex Rives. “Because of this potential, 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. We invite the worldwide scientific community to join us in this project.” 

The partnership delivers on President Trump’s Executive Order Launching the Genesis Mission by leveraging SI-ready biological data, automated laboratory experiments, advanced modeling approaches, and state-of-the-art resources across DOE’s National Laboratory system, including: 

• Exascale Compute Power: Utilizing the nation's premier supercomputing clusters to model complex, multi-modal biological systems and run frontier cell simulations. 

• Advanced Experimental Facilities: Employing world-class User Facilities, including the Joint Genome Institute (JGI) for genome annotation and research, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) for microbial and molecular scale research, and other measurement and imaging capabilities, including X-ray and neutron scattering, and cryo-electron microscopy and cryo-electron tomography at the DOE; to resolve atomic, molecular, and cellular structures. 

• Autonomous Laboratories: Deploying SI-driven advanced robotic and automated experimental systems to rapidly and securely generate and validate biological data at the User Facilities and the Genesis Mission Orchestrated Platforms for Autonomous Laboratories (OPAL) project. 

• Biological Data Systems: Integrated biological data capabilities within DOE’s BioDataNexus Biological and environmental Infrastructure for Data manaGement and Exploration (BRIDGE) and Genesis Mission Lakehouse-enabled SI-ready multi-modal bioimaging data architecture (LAMBDA) projects.