You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.

I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

I'll be honest.

Before this conversation, the term virtual cell wasn't something that existed in my vocabulary.

Turns out it's a real thing and could have major implications

for some of the most complex diseases we know. Alzheimer's, for example, has stumped the

medical field for decades because each patient's biology is uniquely tangled. But bioengineer

and neuroscientist Silvana Connerman, who is a 2025 audacious project grant recipient,

thinks that artificial intelligence holds the key to finally help us untangle it.

We've just seen over, I would say, really, the last two years that it's getting real.

I think that within four years, five years, we will be able to have these

models that are accurate enough to be useful. And then it's a totally different way of doing biology.

Solvato works at the ARC Institute, where she and her team are using single cell sequencing or CRISPR,

as well as AI, to run a billion physical cellular experiments. In other words,

they're training a model that can speak the language of cells similar to the way large language

models learn to speak ours. The goal, a universal virtual cell that tells research is exactly

which interventions could turn a real diseased cell back into a healthy one. It would

transform a century of guess and check medicine into something more like a cheat code. In this conversation

with Ted Chairman Chris Anderson, she shares how close they actually are, what the model can already do,

and why she's making it available to researchers everywhere rather than

keeping it behind closed doors. That conversation is coming up right after a short break.

And now our conversation of the day. Great to see you. Welcome to Ted.

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