By Dara Mormile

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Many people fear that artificial intelligence (AI) will take over everyday jobs and replace humans across various industries. Although some people are skeptical about how technology simplifies life, AI is becoming an essential component of medical research and may enhance our understanding of cells and disease management.

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The amazing research and studies being done by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) thanks to Co-Founder and Co-CEO Priscilla Chan, is bringing a collaborative platform, as well as a Biohub collaboration, to the medical world, paving the way for a future where scientists can curate virtual cells for any and all cell types across tissues, individuals or conditions.
   According to the CZI platform, biologists and medical experts can utilize a complex dashboard for cell imaging models and datasets. One of the featured cases, for example, gives researchers the ability to analyze single-cell transcriptomics data in rare diseases.
   The AI tool, aimed at accelerating biology, will help scientists learn how to leverage a basic cell model, subsequently integrating and comparing their own data. Finding biologically similar cells, and gaining deeper insights into cell-type associations will also help future studies - and can be used for feedback.

"AI models could predict how an immune cell responds to an infection, what happens at the cellular level when a child is born with a rare disease, or even how a patient’s body will respond to a new medication,” Zuckerberg stated on the platform’s web site. “We hope that this collaborative effort will generate new insights about the fundamental characteristics of our cells..

"This is a crucial milestone in CZI’s journey toward curing,
preventing or managing all diseases by the end of this century.”

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CZI’s website notes that “the platform includes tutorials that show how a model can be applied to a specific biological task. For example, the SubCell model tutorial demonstrates how to use SubCell to examine protein localization changes following SARS-CoV2 infection in microscope images of cells. Biologists can open the tutorial in a Google Colab notebook to easily run the model using the provided demo data. This ensures they can quickly get hands-on experience with the model without worrying about hardware requirements, installation dependencies, or transforming input data to ensure it works with the model.”
   Furthermore, “feedback from machine learning experts and biologists will be crucial to training models and providing resources to the community that will one day support the entire biological research lifecycle.”

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was founded in 2015 to help solve some of society’s toughest challenges — from eradicating disease and improving education, to addressing the needs of local communities. Their mission is to build a more inclusive, just, and healthy future for everyone.
   

Priscilla Chan is co-founder and co-CEO of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. As a pediatrician and teacher, Priscilla’s work with patients and students in communities across the Bay Area has informed her desire to make learning more personalized, find new paths to manage and cure disease, and expand opportunity for more people. She is also the founder of The Primary School, which integrates health and education and serves children and families in East Palo Alto and the Belle Haven neighborhood in Menlo Park, California. Priscilla earned her bachelor's degree in biology at Harvard University and her Doctor of Medicine at University of California, San Francisco (UCSF). She completed her pediatrics residency training in the UCSF Pediatric Leaders Advancing Health Equity program.

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