Scaling Bio 007: Xaira's Bo Wang and Ci Chu on Building the Virtual Cell for Drug Discovery

Xaira is trying to build something more ambitious than a single AI model for biology. The company’s wager is that drug discovery improves when protein design, large-scale perturbation biology, foundation models, and therapeutic development are built as one tightly connected system rather than as separate tools or organisations.That broader ambition came into sharper focus in March 2026, when Xaira released X-Cell, a 4.9 billion parameter diffusion model for predicting cellular responses to genet...