🔬Causal Models Need Causal Data - Xaira’s X-Cell model (Bo Wang & Ci Chu)

This episode delves into Zera Therapeutics' AI drug discovery platform, focusing on their X-Cell model. Guests Bo Wang and Ci Chu explain how X-Cell leverages high-throughput causal data generation (Perturb-seq) and a novel diffusion model architecture with biological priors to predict cellular responses to interventions. They discuss the model's generalization capabilities to unseen biological contexts, the current bottlenecks in virtual cell modeling, and the evolving roles of academia and industry in AI for science.