Toward AI-Driven Digital Organism: Multiscale Foundation Models for Predicting, Simulating and Programming Biology at All Levels
This addresses the complexity and cost of manipulating biology in fields like medicine and agriculture, though it is an incremental approach building on existing AI and modeling techniques.
The authors propose constructing an AI-Driven Digital Organism (AIDO) using multiscale foundation models to predict, simulate, and program biology from molecules to individuals, aiming to provide a safe, affordable, and high-throughput alternative to traditional biological experimentation.
We present an approach of using AI to model and simulate biology and life. Why is it important? Because at the core of medicine, pharmacy, public health, longevity, agriculture and food security, environmental protection, and clean energy, it is biology at work. Biology in the physical world is too complex to manipulate and always expensive and risky to tamper with. In this perspective, we layout an engineering viable approach to address this challenge by constructing an AI-Driven Digital Organism (AIDO), a system of integrated multiscale foundation models, in a modular, connectable, and holistic fashion to reflect biological scales, connectedness, and complexities. An AIDO opens up a safe, affordable and high-throughput alternative platform for predicting, simulating and programming biology at all levels from molecules to cells to individuals. We envision that an AIDO is poised to trigger a new wave of better-guided wet-lab experimentation and better-informed first-principle reasoning, which can eventually help us better decode and improve life.