YC Paper Club: AI for Biology, From Reading Data to Designing Living Systems
ycombinator · x · 2026-11-08
Y Combinator's Paper Club this week tackles AI × biology: sequencing costs have collapsed, biological data now outpaces researchers' ability to make sense of it, and models are catching up — shifting the opportunity from reading biological data to modeling and designing living systems.
Speakers cover cancer genomics, virtual cells, genome language models, and biological design:
- Alfredo Gonzalez: treating cancer as a data problem, building a research program around a single patient
- Yusuf Roohani: virtual cells and autonomous research
- Garyk Brixi: what a DNA-trained language model learns — in-context learning emerged without explicit training for it
- Divya Nori: few-shot prompting for biological design
The 80-minute session opens with a live Turing test experiment.
Related event: YC Paper Club Explores AI for Biology(3 posts)→
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