Anna Greka

But from a fundamental scientific perspective, this is basically a project that aims to identify every opportunity for nodes underlying all rare genetic diseases as quickly as possible.

And this was one of the reasons I was there at the AI for Science Forum because, of course, when one undertakes a project in which you're basically

This is what we're trying to do in the ladder secures accelerator, introduce dozens of thousands of missense and nonsense human mutations that cause genetic diseases, simultaneously introduce them into multiple human cells, and then use modern scalable technology tools, things like

CRISPR screens, massively parallel CRISPR screens, to try to interrogate all of these diseases in parallel, identify the nodes, and then develop, of course, therapeutic programs based on the discovery of these nodes.

This is a massive data generation project that is much needed.

In addition to the fact that it will help hopefully accelerate our approach to all rare diseases, genetic diseases, it is also a highly controlled cell perturbation dataset that will require the most modern tools in AI,

not only to extract the data and understand the data of this data set, but also because this, again, extremely controlled, well-controlled cell perturbation data set can be used to train models, train AI models, so that in the future, and I hope this doesn't sound too futuristic, but I think that we're all aiming for that.

Cell biologists for sure dream of this moment, I think, when we can actually have

in silico, the opportunity to make predictions about what cell behaviors are gonna look like based on a new perturbation that was not in the training set.

So an experiment that hasn't yet been done on a cell, a perturbation that has not been made on a human cell, what if, like a new drug, for example, or a new kind of perturbation, a new chemical perturbation,

How would it affect the behavior of the cell?

Can we make a predictive model for that?

This doesn't exist today, but I think this is something, the cell prediction model is a big question for biology for the future.

And so I'm very energized by the opportunity to both

address this problem of rare monogenic diseases that remains an unmet need and help as many patients as possible, while at the same time advancing biology as much as we possibly can.

So, you know, it's kind of like a win-win, lifting all boats type of enterprise, hopefully.

Collectively.

Oh, my God, it's absolutely, you know, from a biologist perspective, it's the challenge of a generation for sure.

You know, we think, you know, taking humans to Mars, you know, I mean, that's an aspirational sort of big, you know, big ambitious goal.

I think this is the, if you will, the Mars shot for biology, you know, like being able to, you know,