Eric Topol

These rare diseases cumulatively are a very high proportion, 10% of Americans or more.

So they're not so rare when you think about the overall.

Yeah.

Now, and of course, there's this toxic proteinopathies.

There's at least 50 of these.

And the point that people have been thinking until now that, oh, we found the mangled protein.

But what you've zeroed in on is that, hey, you know what?

It's not just the mangled proteins.

It's how it gets stuck in the cell and that it can't get to the lysozymes to get rid of it.

There's no waste system.

And so this is such fundamental work.

Now, that gets me to the virtual cell story, kind of what you're getting into.

I just had a conversation with Charlotte Bond and Steve Quake, who published a paper in December on the virtual cell.

And of course, that's...

many years off.

But of course, it's a big, bold, you know, ambitious project to be able to say, as you just summarized, if you had cells in silico and you could do perturbations in silico.

And of course, they were validated by actual experiments or, you know, bidirectionally that the experiments, the real ones helped validate the virtual cell.

But then you could get

A true acceleration of your understanding of cell biology, your field, of course.

What you described, is it the same as a virtual cell?