How much is the U.S. government putting in?

The Department of Energy will invest over $500 million over five years in lab measurement, modeling, and computing. The NIH is coordinating use of datasets from past federal investments of over $500 million.

What is Isomorphic Labs' role?

Isomorphic Labs, founded in 2021 by Google DeepMind chairman Demis Hassabis, said it will help build open resources for the global research community and accelerate progress in understanding and treating disease.

Who else is funding this?

Biohub announced that the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the National Institutes of Health, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, and Meta will all contribute.

AI in HealthcareOpen-Source AIAI Business & IndustryGIGAZINE AI13h agoOct 9, 2026, 01:00 JST

Virtual Biology Initiative draws $1.8 billion for AI biology data

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3 Key Points

What happened
Biohub's Virtual Biology Initiative secured $1.8 billion in joint funding, with the Department of Energy committing over $500 million over five years and Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, Meta, and NIH joining.
Why it matters
The NIH will standardize existing datasets so AI models can train on them, suggesting publicly funded biological data could become shared infrastructure for open-science AI.

WHO IT HITSPharma and biotech research teams, along with academic labs that depend on public biological datasets, stand to gain standardized training data. Government science agencies also gain a formal role in shaping how AI models for biology are built.

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Context & Analysis

Biohub is the nonprofit research organization created with funding from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, and its parent body is the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. The Virtual Biology Initiative is a five-year plan aimed at building predictive models of life, and this latest announcement adds U.S. federal science agencies to a roster that already includes major AI and biotech players.

The Department of Energy's science undersecretary, Dario Gil, framed the effort around combining DOE assets such as the Joint Genome Institute, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, and advanced structural beamlines with Biohub's AI model and tool development. The NIH, for its part, is coordinating access to datasets and knowledge bases built through more than $500 million in past federal investment.

Demis Hassabis, who founded Isomorphic Labs in 2021 and chairs Google DeepMind, said the most important application of AI is improving medicine and human health, and expressed high expectations for the partnership. Biohub and the NIH together aim to standardize these datasets so they can be used to train AI models.

FAQ

How much is the U.S. government putting in?: The Department of Energy will invest over $500 million over five years in lab measurement, modeling, and computing. The NIH is coordinating use of datasets from past federal investments of over $500 million.
What is Isomorphic Labs' role?: Isomorphic Labs, founded in 2021 by Google DeepMind chairman Demis Hassabis, said it will help build open resources for the global research community and accelerate progress in understanding and treating disease.
Who else is funding this?: Biohub announced that the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the National Institutes of Health, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, and Meta will all contribute.

GIGAZINE AIRead Original Article

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