TERRA: A Tissue World Model Pretrained on 112M Cells

mo_lotfollahi · x · 2026-08-06

A research team has introduced TERRA, a world model for human tissues. The model is pretrained on a massive corpus of 112 million cells, spanning 20 tissues and 26 disease conditions, with the majority of data newly generated via Xenium 5000-plex spatial transcriptomics.

Much like ViT for vision or ESM for proteins, TERRA aims to provide a universal foundational representation for human tissue, capturing its multi-scale logic from genes to cells and their microenvironments. Borrowing from the JEPA architecture championed by Yann LeCun, TERRA learns by making predictions in embedding space to understand and model complex human tissue states.

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