Hacking Life: How to decode and manipulate biological cells with AI

The cell is the fundamental building block of biological organisms, such as us humans. As such, technologies to understand and hack cells enable the cure of diseases and potentially even to expand our life span.In my talk, I provide an overview on how biologists and bioinformaticians use AI to understand and hack cells. Understanding the role of individual cells is a core aspect of biological research, given the extreme diversity of cellular states and functions. A common measurement method to characterize a given cell quantifies which of its genes are activated and how strongly. While this provides a rich high-dimensional readout, it is complex to interpret, given the challenge of deriving an intuition about the meaning of all the individual gene activation levels, as well as their combinatorial effects. In my research I combine recent AI methods, most prominently multimodal large language models, to enable the analysis and interpretation of these measurements with the English language. I will present this work alongside a more general overview into the research landscape of “AI cell models”. Furthermore, I will provide preliminary insights into how these interpretations form the basis to “hack” cells, which is accomplished through the introduction of complex “illegal instructions” in the form of molecular agents, which alter the behavior of the cell's internal programs. With this talk, I aim to provide the Chaos community with a focused insight into the biological cell and the ways in which recent developments in AI help us understand and manipulate them.