Arc Institute

The Arc Institute in Palo Alto is a well-funded nonprofit research institute founded in 2021 with Stanford, UCSF and Berkeley affiliations, building virtual cell AI models and the datasets needed to train them. It is home to the Evo and Evo 2 genome language models built with NVIDIA, the State perturbation-response model, the Arc Virtual Cell Atlas and the Tahoe-100M dataset, and it ran the Virtual Cell Challenge in 2025; its scale of perturbation data collection is unusual for an academic institute, and Silvana Konermann is among the people linked. OnCo connects it to the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub and to the virtual cell roadmap that runs from bulk omics to a predictive model of a cancer cell. Whether perturbation-trained models predict responses in patients, not just cell lines, is the open question. Its Evo, State and Virtual Cell Atlas programmes are listed below.