Arc Institute announces first Virtual Cell Challenge winners
A 2026 zero-shot round follows
Confirmed
The takeaway
Arc Institute’s first Virtual Cell Challenge asked teams to predict single-cell transcriptomic responses to CRISPRi gene knockdowns.
Status
- Claim
Confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Importance
- 2 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- 2025 prizes: 1st BioMap (BM_xTVC, xTrimoSCPerturb) $100k; 2nd XLearning Lab, Sichuan Univ. $50k; 3rd Team Outlier (UChicago/Dartmouth/HKU, TransPert) $25k; $100k Generalist Prize to Altos Labs (‘go-with-the-flow’)
- 1,200+ teams from 114 countries; 300+ final submissions
- Metrics: Perturbation Discrimination Score, Differential Expression Score, MAE; almost all models were worse than baseline on MAE, and community analysis showed PDS is scale-sensitive, which prompted a 7-metric Generalist Prize
- 2026 challenge: no training set; predict CRISPRi knockdown responses in 6 unseen cell lines (3 validation, 3 final test) from unperturbed profiles; test set 22 Oct, submissions due 5 Nov 2026, winners mid-to-late Nov 2026
- 2026 prizes $100k/$50k/$25k (cash plus NVIDIA Brev credits); sponsors NVIDIA, 10x Genomics, Ultima Genomics
What happened
Arc Institute ran an open competition on “virtual cell” models, meaning models that predict how a cell’s gene expression changes when a gene is knocked down. Chinese and US academic and industry teams took the prizes. The wrap-up said openly that standard metrics could be gamed or failed to beat simple baselines.
Why it matters
Virtual cells are a major goal of AI biology, and this challenge is becoming the field’s shared benchmark. Its first round mainly showed how hard honest evaluation is. The 2026 zero-shot round, with results in late Nov 2026, will test real generalisation across cell types.
Sources
4 sources from 3 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
4 sources: 4 primary
Primary
- Arc Institute: Virtual Cell Challenge 2025 wrap-up, winners and reflectionsarcinstitute.org, official
- Arc Institute: The 2026 Virtual Cell Challengearcinstitute.org, official
- Virtual Cell Challenge sitevirtualcellchallenge.org, official
- Arc Institute on X: winners announcementx.com, official
Changes
- Filed