Virtual Biology Community Meetup
2025: the first year of the virtual cell – challenges, learnings, and what’s next in 2026
This community meetup brings together leading academic researchers and industry practitioners to take an honest look at what worked, what didn’t, and what truly lies ahead for virtual cells as a scientific and translational paradigm.
Hosted by Turbine, this event aims to set the tone for the next phase of the field: rigorous, transparent, and grounded in real-world biological and industrial constraints.
Format
Three short talks (~15 minutes each)
Panel discussion (~45 minutes) with all speakers
Moderated by Daniel Veres, MD, PhD (Co-founder & CSO at Turbine)
📍 Online event (Zoom)
🔗 Access link will be shared with registered participants
The past year marked a turning point for virtual biology and virtual cell modeling. After years of promises, bold claims, and accelerating hype, 2025 was the first year the field was seriously tested - technically, scientifically, and industrially.
Speakers
Prof. Dr. Fabian J. Theis
Prof. Fabian Theis is internationally recognized for pioneering work at the interface of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and biomedicine. As Head of the Computational Health Center at Helmholtz Munich and Chair for Mathematical Models of Biological Systems at the Technical University of Munich, he leads cutting-edge research on multimodal data integration, single-cell and spatial omics, and AI-powered modeling of cell states in health and disease.
A founding force behind Helmholtz.AI and co-director of several national and European AI initiatives, Theis plays a key role in shaping the biomedical AI landscape. He is a core contributor to the Human Cell Atlas and has driven the development of widely adopted computational tools in the life sciences.
His achievements have been recognized with numerous honors, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize (2023), the ISCB Innovator Award (2025), and an ERC Advanced Grant (2022). In 2025, he was elected to the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina and appointed Chair of the Bavarian AI Council.
Beyond academia, Theis actively advises biotech companies and drives translational AI research towards clinical applications and precision medicine.
Ron Alfa, MD, PhD
Ron Alfa is a physician scientist at the forefront of leveraging technology to tackle unmet therapeutic needs in medicine. He is Co-Founder and CEO of NOETIK, a next generation precision oncology company using multimodal foundation models pre-trained on large-scale human tumor data to discover cancer therapeutics. Prior to founding Noetik, Ron was Senior Vice President, Head of Research and acting-CSO at Recursion, where he led the company’s scientific organizations and portfolio strategy. At Recursion, he led portfolio and platform builds across rare disease, neuroscience, oncology, and immunology, and was responsible for advancing multiple therapeutic programs from discovery to clinical development. Ron holds an MD and PhD from Stanford University School of Medicine, where he completed his doctoral work in Neuroscience, and has a MA in History of Medicine from UCL.
Amaro Taylor-Weiner, PhD
Amaro Taylor-Weiner is a researcher and builder focused on applying AI to translational biology. He recently co-founded a new company; previously he led virtual cell modeling for target discovery at Arsenal Biosciences. There, he and the team developed DINOcell, a self-distillation framework for predicting cellular perturbation effects from single-cell transcriptomics, which was validated by an integrated wet-dry lab team.
Prior to Arsenal, Amaro served as Chief AI Officer at Absci, where he oversaw computational and high-throughput screening teams developing generative AI for antibody design. He previously held leadership roles at PathAI as VP of Machine Learning R&D and Director of Biomedical Data Sciences, where he built foundation models for digital pathology and delivered ML products across oncology and liver disease.
Amaro's research spans cancer genomics, pathology AI, and protein design. He holds a PhD in Biomedical Informatics from Harvard University and a BS in Philosophy and Cognitive Science from Tufts University.
Moderator
Co-founder & CSO, Daniel Veres, MD, Phd, Turbine
Daniel Veres is a physician-scientist and entrepreneur focused on translating computational biology into clinically actionable insights. As Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Turbine, he leads the development of AI-powered virtual biology platforms that model cellular behavior to accelerate drug discovery and improve clinical translatability.
He works at the intersection of computational modeling, experimental biology, and translational research, leading multidisciplinary teams to bring simulation-driven approaches into real-world pharmaceutical R&D.