{"entity":{"id":"virtual-cell-models","kind":"term","name":"Virtual cell models and in-silico perturbation screens","aka":["virtual cell","virtual cell model","virtual cells","in-silico perturbation","in silico perturbation","in-silico knockout screen","in silico knockout","perturbation prediction","Virtual Cell Challenge","CZI Virtual Cells","OCTO-vc","Noetik OCTO-VirtualCell"],"tldr":"A virtual cell is a computer model of a cell that predicts what happens when a gene is knocked out or a drug is added, letting researchers run perturbation experiments in software before the laboratory.","summary":"A cellular model or virtual cell is a computational model of aspects of a biological cell for in silico research (Wikipedia). The Arc Institute's Virtual Cell Challenge scores models on predicting expression after unseen genetic perturbations, and the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub's Virtual Cells platform hosts models, data and benchmarks for the field. Noetik's OCTO-vc applies a masked-token spatial single-cell transformer to proprietary tumour data for the same purpose. Whether a model recovers known biology (the right pathway for a known drug) is the first test of any in-silico screen, and a screen that returns nothing for mutation-driven drugs is behaving correctly, not failing.","asOf":"2026-09-24","wikipedia":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_model","links":[{"label":"Arc Institute Virtual Cell Challenge","url":"https://virtualcellchallenge.org/"},{"label":"CZ Biohub AI-supported Virtual Cells platform","url":"https://virtualcellmodels.cziscience.com/"},{"label":"Wikipedia: in silico","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_silico"},{"label":"Noetik","url":"https://www.noetik.ai/"},{"label":"Wikipedia","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_model"}],"tags":["cansim-terms"],"related":["noetik","idea-data-open-cell-foundation-model","cancer-ai-vocabulary"],"cancers":[],"sections":[],"technologies":["crispr-screens"],"targets":[],"drugs":[],"companies":[],"institutions":[],"pathways":[],"terms":["foundation-model","mechanism-of-action-recovery","single-cell-rna-seq"],"trials":[],"people":[],"bottlenecks":[],"keyPapers":[],"journals":[],"dependsOn":[],"notes":["Listed in the CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme; CanSim page path /terms/virtual-cell."],"provenance":{"editedBy":"OnCo CanSim terms wave (Wikipedia summaries, standards and project pages, GDC and FDA pages, Europe PMC)","editedOn":"2026-09-24","note":"CanSim terms map 1.0.0 (docs/onco/terms.json, generated 2026-09-24), CC BY 4.0, attribution: CanSim project, an open, public-data-first cancer foundation-model programme"},"category":"Methods and models"},"route":"/terms/virtual-cell-models/","neighbours":{"company":[{"id":"noetik","kind":"company","name":"Noetik","route":"/companies/noetik/"}],"idea":[{"id":"idea-data-open-cell-foundation-model","kind":"idea","name":"An open foundation model of the cancer cell trained on perturbation data","route":"/ideas/idea-data-open-cell-foundation-model/"}],"term":[{"id":"leaderboard-benchmark","kind":"term","name":"Benchmarks, leaderboards and contamination","route":"/terms/leaderboard-benchmark/"},{"id":"cancer-ai-vocabulary","kind":"term","name":"Cancer AI vocabulary (CanSim terms map)","route":"/terms/cancer-ai-vocabulary/"},{"id":"foundation-model","kind":"term","name":"Foundation model","route":"/terms/foundation-model/"},{"id":"mechanism-of-action-recovery","kind":"term","name":"Mechanism-of-action recovery and known-biology probes","route":"/terms/mechanism-of-action-recovery/"},{"id":"single-cell-rna-seq","kind":"term","name":"Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq, 10x Chromium)","route":"/terms/single-cell-rna-seq/"}],"technology":[{"id":"crispr-screens","kind":"technology","name":"CRISPR functional genomics","route":"/technologies/crispr-screens/"}]}}