iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 23/09/2026

Many important bacterial non-coding RNAs and structural elements remain undiscovered. To help, David Li, Garyk Brixi, Michael Fischbach, @brianhie.bsky.social & team introduce Minerva, which uses a genome language model to predict RNA base pairing, repeats, & other interactions from sequence alone.

12212

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 15/09/2026

Want to join Arc? We're hiring experts in disease bio, computational bio, functional genomics, and NGS for our Tech Centers, plus postdocs and research associates in our Core Labs. All roles are based in Palo Alto, and are on-site or hybrid. Learn more or apply here: lnkd.in/gyfgqR3n

arcinstitute.org

Jobs | Arc Institute

Arc Institute is an independent nonprofit research organization headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

045

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 08/09/2026

Loss of function for 1 gene can make a cancer cell resist a DNA damage response (DDR) inhibitor, while another gene can make it easy to kill. Arc Core Investigator Luke Gilbert and collaborators mapped both across five DDR inhibitors and found loss of PRDX1 sensitizes cells to all five.

141

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 02/09/2026

Science Fellow Jingtian Zhou builds single-cell and computational frameworks to probe the 3D genome. His work tells us more about how the epigenome and transcriptome interact to shape cell state and complex disease: arcinstitute.org/news/jingtia...

arcinstitute.org

Why Jingtian Zhou is building high-resolution maps of the 3D genome | Arc Institute

Each cell in our body inherits the same DNA, yet becomes one of hundreds of cell types. We make immune cells that hunt down viruses, brain cells that pattern our memories, and pacemaker cells that gen...

150

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 26/08/2026

Nearly 300 teams have already submitted to the Virtual Cell Challenge leaderboard to see how their initial models rank on this year’s six metrics. Here’s the current standing:

121

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 20/08/2026

The 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge has begun! Submissions and the leaderboard are now open. This year's task: multi-context generalization and zero-shot prediction. Models will need to predict perturbation responses in cellular contexts with no training data. arcinstitute.org/news/virtual...

arcinstitute.org

The 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge: predicting perturbation responses in cell contexts a model has never seen | Arc Institute

Registration for the 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge is open at virtualcellchallenge.org. This year the task is zero-shot: we are not releasing a training set, and the evaluation dataset is far more expan...

1145

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 17/08/2026

Four years ago, a mystery case led Core Investigator @jvpluv to discover a new diagnosis (ABCD). Today his team published one of the largest clinical surveys of unexplained spinal cord disease to date in @JAMANeuro, finding ABCD in roughly half of patients.

163

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 14/08/2026

The same method that teaches an LLM which answers people prefer can teach a protein model which sequences are more stable. This is the basis for ProteinDPO, developed by Innovation Investigator @brianhie.bsky.social, Talal Widatalla, and team.

182

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 13/08/2026

In 2024, we introduced universal DNA rearrangement with bridge RNA. Now, in @Nature, @pdhsu @hnisimasu & team solve the structural mechanism of bridge excision—how the complex assembles for intramolecular recombination—yielding new engineering handles for programmable biology.

132

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 28/07/2026

The Proto team from @brianhie.bsky.social's lab will be at the re:AGENT hackathon, a two-day weekend (8/15–8/16) in San Francisco for people interested in building AI scientists, datasets, or pipelines for biological design. Apply by Thursday, July 30th at 12 PM PT at luma.com/g6org075

luma.com

re:AGENT – End to End Agentic Science · Luma

WHAT IS re:AGENT re:AGENT is a two-day build weekend focused on the infrastructure scientific agents still need: better datasets, sharper tools, and reliable…

141

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 23/07/2026

Congrats to Science Fellow Jingtian Zhou and team on their human epigenome atlas, now out in @ScienceMagazine. They show that grouping cells by DNA methylation or chromatin structure yields different subtypes in some lineages but not others: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

science.org

Human body single-cell atlas of three-dimensional genome organization and DNA methylation

Higher-order chromatin structure and DNA methylation are critical for gene regulation, but how these vary across the human body remains unclear. We performed multiomic profiling of three-dimensional (...

030

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 21/07/2026

We are hiring a number of AIxBio positions across the organization, including Directors of Machine Learning for each of our Institute Initiatives and postdoctoral fellows focused on ML for Biology and Biological Design in Patrick Hsu's Lab. Learn more or apply here: arcinstitute.org/jobs

arcinstitute.org

Jobs | Arc Institute

Arc Institute is an independent nonprofit research organization headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

121

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 17/07/2026

Complex I is the largest complex of the electron transport chain and the entry point for electrons that power ATP production. New work from Core Investigator Isha Jain and team identifies THAP12 as a dedicated transcription factor controlling how much Complex I a cell builds.

141

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 17/07/2026

Our 3rd Annual Investigator Retreat brought together talks on genome engineering, generative protein models, and computational biology, alongside deep dives into neurodegeneration, immunology, and metabolism.

130

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 13/07/2026

Today, we welcome Usman Muzaffar as our Chief Technology Officer. At Arc, he'll bring over two decades of engineering leadership, most recently as SVP of Engineering at Cloudflare, to advancing our Virtual Cell Initiative and Arc's broader computational infrastructure.

151

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 08/07/2026

Effective treatments for mitochondrial disease are scarce. A new paper in Nature Metabolism from Core Investigator Isha Jain and team offers one, showing that breathing low-oxygen air nearly triples lifespan in a mouse model of HTRA2 deficiency.

111

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 02/07/2026

Cells control gene expression through combinatorial interactions between readers, writers, and erasers of chromatin marks, but most epigenetic editing tools rely on a single effector in isolation. COMBINE is the first platform to test those combinations at scale, screening 50,000+ effector pairs.

182

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 30/06/2026

Start assembling your team because the 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge officially kicks off on Thursday, August 20. This is round two of our global competition to understand and predict how cells respond to internal cues and external stimuli.

132

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 29/06/2026

Science Fellow Jingtian Zhou and colleagues traced stress-driven glioma growth in mice to a bone marrow-derived macrophage that infiltrates the brain tumor and acts on the immune environment rather than the tumor cells.

132

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 26/06/2026

STING agonists can shrink tumors and make them visible to the immune system, but high doses become toxic to T cells. Core Investigator @lingyinli.bsky.social and team have identified SLC7A1, the T cell arginine transporter, as the primary route by which these agonists enter and kill T cells

140

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 24/06/2026

Congrats to @brianhie.bsky.social, @synbiogaolab.bsky.social, & team on Germinal, now out in NatBiotech. Their pipeline designs epitope-targeted antibodies with nanomolar affinity while testing only tens of designs per target, making antibody design far more accessible. nature.com/articles/s41...

nature.com

Efficient generation of epitope-targeted antibodies with Germinal - Nature Biotechnology

Germinal achieves epitope-targeted, de novo complementarity-determining region design with high experimental success rates.

072

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 23/06/2026

Imagine programming protein, DNA, and RNA systems like you would write computer code, or even by natural language prompting of an AI agent. @brianhie.bsky.social and team just made this a reality with Proto: a high-level programming language for generative biology.

1125

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 10/06/2026

Arc’s Virtual Cell Initiative focuses on the full-stack development of an accurate AI model to advance complex disease research. Executive Director Silvana Konermann joined TED’s Chris Anderson to talk about what we’re building. www.ted.com/talks/silvan...

ted.com

The human cell is wildly complex. Can AI decode it?

Silvana Konermann and the team at Arc Institute are trying to crack one of science's most difficult problems: why complex diseases like Alzheimer's and cancer remain so stubbornly unsolvable, even as ...

141

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 29/05/2026

The brain works hard to clear waste, and impairments are central to neurodegeneration. In @cellcellpress.bsky.social, Innovation Investigator Andrew Yang and team map it from the inside out, following the brain's own proteins to see where waste actually goes.

160

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 26/05/2026

Most spatial CRISPR screens require trade-offs in throughput or readout depth. A new preprint introduces PerturbSpace: spatially resolved, multimodal, whole-transcriptome on standard single-cell workflows.

153

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 15/05/2026

Introducing the inaugural cohort of the Arc AIxBio Fellows. These five student teams will each tackle an ambitious ML project over the next 6-12 months with a dedicated mentor.

130

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 07/05/2026

Three years, same spot, a lot more science 🧬

2232

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 30/04/2026

Congratulations to Core Investigator Isha Jain and her team! Their paper is featured on the latest cover of @cellcellpress.bsky.social. They developed a new nutrigenomics framework to systematically identify genetic diseases that are amenable to vitamin-based therapies.

121

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 29/04/2026

Today in @nature.com, the @genophoria.bsky.social and & Vijay Ramani labs reveal that our picture of how nucleosomes regulate DNA accessibility has been too simple. They find that over 85% of nucleosomes in mammalian cells are structurally distorted, with DNA partially accessible even while wrapped.

1166

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 29/04/2026

By scaling high-quality foundational datasets to train virtual cell models, we can directly accelerate progress against complex diseases. We look forward to working with Biohub and other partner organizations on this effort.

031

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 24/04/2026

In Nature Review Bioengineering, Core Investigator Felix Horns and colleagues outline how engineered living cells could deliver mRNA to places lipid nanoparticles and viral vectors can't reach, homing to disease sites and activating only when they detect the right signals.

163

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 23/04/2026

While chemotherapy kills some tumor cells, others survive and can drive relapse. This variability isn't fully explained by DNA mutations. In a new preprint, Core Investigator @genophoria.bsky.social and lab identify RNF8 and MIS18A as drivers of tumor cell variability in breast cancer.

182

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 17/04/2026

Arc Co-Founder and Executive Director Silvana Konermann discusses what motivates her to use AI to understand complex human disease in this video from The Audacious Project. Learn more about Arc's Virtual Cell Initiative: arcinstitute.org/virtual-cell...

youtube.com

Building the world's first AI-powered "virtual cell" to accelerate drug discovery with Arc Institute

YouTube video by The Audacious Project

050

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 16/04/2026

mTOR inhibitors stop cancer cells from dividing, but they rarely kill them. New work in Molecular Cell from Luke Gilbert & lab reveals a mechanism connecting mTOR signaling, cholesterol biology, and ferroptosis that could turn growth arrest into cancer cell death.

122

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 14/04/2026

For decades, we’ve known that the ENPP1 K173Q variant raises type 2 diabetes risk, but not why. New work from @songnanwang.bsky.social in @lingyinli.bsky.social's lab, in collaboration with @svenssonlab.bsky.social, shows that this variant may promote metabolic dysfunction in brown adipose tissue.

101

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 13/04/2026

Most genomic AI models use fixed rules to process DNA into chunks, imposing arbitrary boundaries on a sequence with its own biological structure. Arnav Shah, Victor Li, and team developed dnaHNet, a tokenizer-free foundation model that learns its own segmentation from scratch.

191

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 20/03/2026

Over 250 million protein sequences are known, but fewer than 0.1% have confirmed functions. Today, @genophoria.bsky.social, @bowang87.bsky.social & team introduce BioReason-Pro, a multimodal reasoning model that predicts protein function and explains its reasoning like an expert would.

1176

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 16/03/2026

It's been a busy start to 2026 at Arc. We celebrated one year of Evo 2, announced findings from the Jain Lab and Thaiss Lab, and released MULTI-evolve, a new AI framework for designing complex proteins.

130

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 14/03/2026

Arc Co-Founder and Executive Director Silvana Konermann is speaking at TED2026 in Vancouver (April 13-17). She'll be sharing her vision for Arc's Virtual Cell Initiative, recently announced as part of The Audacious Project's 2025 cohort, on one of the world's biggest stages.

153

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 12/03/2026

A protein that stabilizes cancer-suppressing mRNAs turns out to be a key brake on breast cancer metastasis. A paper from Core Investigator @genophoria.bsky.social and lab in Science Advances traces the mechanism to RNA decay and an RNA-binding protein most studies have overlooked.

162

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 11/03/2026

Today in @nature.com, the @christophthaiss.bsky.social & @maayanlevy.bsky.social labs trace age-related memory loss to the gastrointestinal tract & map the complete gut-to-brain pathway driving it. Targeting this pathway can reverse cognitive aging in mice. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

1178

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 06/03/2026

CAR T cell therapy has shown strong results against certain cancers, but metabolic exhaustion limits its effectiveness over time. In Cell, the @maayanlevy.bsky.social & @christophthaiss.bsky.social labs report that a common supplement can fuel CAR T cells to fight cancer more effectively.

173

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 04/03/2026

Evo 2, the largest fully open biological AI model to date, is now published in @nature.com youtu.be/o_w-E--u7GQ

youtu.be

Building Evo 2: A Frontier DNA Language Model

YouTube video by Arc Institute

1126

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 03/03/2026

This new review from Core Investigator @christophthaiss.bsky.social & Innovation Investigator @maayanlevy.bsky.social maps how gut metabolites shape diseases from IBD to cancer, and lays out a framework for using them as therapies.

065

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 27/02/2026

Congratulations to Arc Innovation Investigator Theo Roth on receiving a 2026 Michelson Medical Research Foundation Next Generation Grant. Theo's team is using combinatorial genetic engineering to create immune cell states not found in nature. www.michelsonmedicalresearch.org/news/michels...

050

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 25/02/2026

Most drug discovery starts with a disease & searches for a cure. New research out in Cell from Arc investigator Isha Jain’s lab flips this model, starting with a potential cure (vitamins) & systematically identifying which diseases it could treat.

143

Arc Institute @arcinstitute.org · 24/02/2026

We're honored to be named a grantee in The Audacious Project's 2025 cohort, supporting our Virtual Cell Initiative.

132