Your life should not be dependent upon siloed and compartmentalized healthcare with partial and broken information chains. Your organs, your tissues, your cells, your DNA – are all part of who you are. Your health records and diagnostics like MRI, CT, PET, X-Ray shed light on your health and wellbeing. 

Decades ago, medicine and biology parted and distanced themselves from each other as if they had no connection, no dependency, no bond. It was a pragmatic way to deliver healthcare, focusing on the symptoms – one morbidity at a time – and centered on unoptimized healing.

No human doctor could have brought biology and medicine together. No one could have reintegrated the two. But thanks to the GenAI systems, the world is now at the inception stage of a major revolution. Welcome to the era of foundational models of biology. 

GenAI, with its ability to create new data samples from existing data, is poised to revolutionize various industries, including healthcare and life sciences. 

The revolution 

French startup Bioptimus which has emerged from stealth mode announcing a successful seed funding round of $35 million is aiming to build the first universal AI foundation model for biology, connecting different scales of biology with GenAI.

The Paris-based startup aims to link various biological scales using GenAI, encompassing molecules, cells, tissues, and entire organisms. This integration is poised to drive scientific breakthroughs and expedite innovation in biomedicine and beyond.

Bioptimus boasts a team comprising Google DeepMind alumni and Owkin scientists. These experts will leverage Owkin’s data generation capabilities and global access to diverse patient data from top academic hospitals, alongside a scalable and secure computing environment provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS). This abundance of data allows Bioptimus to create computational representations that outperform models trained on public datasets and single data modalities, capturing the full diversity of biology.

Professor Jean-Philippe Vert, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Bioptimus, Chief R&D Officer of Owkin and former Research Lead at Google Brain, said: “The application of foundation models and generative AI to biology is set to have a profound impact in science. By harnessing the power of foundation models and advanced algorithms trained on massive amounts of biological and multimodal data across scales, we aim to capture the laws of biology that have hitherto remained too complex to be properly understood. This holistic understanding of biology across scales will be critical to accelerate biomedical and environmental science.”

Challenges and the future  

Access to data remains a significant challenge in developing comprehensive AI models for biology. However, Bioptimus is well-positioned to overcome this challenge through its partnership with Owkin and its commitment to advancing open science.

As we stand on the cusp of a new era in biology, fueled by the transformative power of GenAI, the possibilities for scientific discovery and innovation are endless. From unraveling the complexities of molecular biology to advancing personalized medicine, GenAI is reshaping the landscape of biological research in unprecedented ways. French startup Bioptimus exemplifies this revolutionary spirit, pioneering the development of the first universal AI foundation model for biology. As we look to the future, the integration of GenAI promises to unlock new frontiers in biology, ushering in a new wave of advancements that have the potential to change the world as we know it.