self-driving-lab

Today in AI for life science: industry pours billions into agentic labs and biology foundation models, virtual-cell models keep scaling while simple baselines stay stubbornly competitive, and image-based profiling races toward open, assay-agnostic foundation models.

Today in AI for life science: Biohub’s protein world model designs cancer binders that work in the wet lab, ’thinking microscopes’ turn instruments into co-scientists, and a sharp reminder that predictions still have to survive the bench.

Today in AI for life science: CZI’s rBio learns to reason about cells with a virtual cell as its verifier, self-driving labs cross into industrial infrastructure, and a sharp reality check on what virtual-cell models still can’t do.

At an invited talk at CZI, we ran a live, fully agent-controlled wet-lab experiment on the REEF Imaging Farm. A single natural-language prompt set an entire lab in motion, on real cells, in real time. We interviewed the agent that ran it.