---
id: "2025-12-06-virtual-cell-challenge-2025-winners"
url: "https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-12-06-virtual-cell-challenge-2025-winners/"
as_of: "2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00"
date: "2025-12-06"
date_precision: day
category: benchmark
importance: 2
confidence: high
status: [Confirmed]
sources: 4
editor: human editor
human_review: null
version: "2026-10-04"
---

As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-12-06-virtual-cell-challenge-2025-winners/

# Arc Institute announces first Virtual Cell Challenge winners

Full title: Arc Institute announces first Virtual Cell Challenge winners; a 2026 zero-shot round follows

Arc Institute's first Virtual Cell Challenge asked teams to predict single-cell transcriptomic responses to CRISPRi gene knockdowns. On 6 Dec 2025 Arc named BioMap's xTrimoSCPerturb the winner out of 1,200+ teams from 114 countries. Organisers admitted metric problems: almost every model did worse than a baseline on MAE. The 2026 edition, opened on 20 Aug 2026, is harder (zero-shot transfer to unseen cell lines), with results due in late November 2026.

## 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.

## Your AI and this story

- GPT-6 Astra (training cutoff April 2026): in its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5 (training cutoff June 2026): in its training data
- Gemini 4 Hydrogen (training cutoff March 2026): in its training data
- Grok 4.7 (training cutoff May 2026): in its training data

## Sources

1. [Arc Institute: Virtual Cell Challenge 2025 wrap-up, winners and reflections](https://arcinstitute.org/news/virtual-cell-challenge-2025-wrap-up) (arcinstitute.org, official)
2. [Arc Institute: The 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge](https://arcinstitute.org/news/virtual-cell-challenge-2026) (arcinstitute.org, official)
3. [Virtual Cell Challenge site](https://virtualcellchallenge.org/) (virtualcellchallenge.org, official)
4. [Arc Institute on X: winners announcement](https://x.com/arcinstitute/status/1997516976873521411) (x.com, official)

## Changes

- 2026-09-29 (filed): Created

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- Archived: 1 post, listed in https://postcutoff.com/e/2025-12-06-virtual-cell-challenge-2025-winners/index.json