Controlling Biology - Fabian Theis, Helmholtz Munich

This post profiles Fabian Theis of Helmholtz Munich, whose lab has pushed algorithms for multi-scale, multi-modal, time-varying biological data and helped shape the Virtual Cell concept. It notes that a 2025 Arc Virtual Cell Challenge showed constant baselines often beat sophisticated perturbation-prediction models, though better-calibrated metrics let deep learning outperform the mean baseline, and that Theis argues existing datasets make perturbation prediction too easy a problem. It frames the roughly $1.8B Biohub commitment from Biohub, NIH, DOE, Google and Meta as funding large, high-precision, multi-scale data collection to predict evolution across molecules, cells, niches, tissues, organs and organisms.