Plate VI · News
New papers, tools and news, as posted by @fabian_theis. Replies and reposts are left out.
Beautiful short Nature Methods N&V “Teaching an old dog new cells” led by J Linder & D Kelley. Also on scooby, pushing seq2func models toward true cell-state–specific reg modeling 🧬 Fitting disc here at CSHL with Anshul & others on this next frontier nature.com/articles/s4159…
Excited to be at the 90th Cold Spring Harbor Symposium on AI in Biology 🧬🤖 Amazing speakers & discussions amongst others on how AI moves from analyzing biology to actively helping shape next experiments. 🚀 Will talk about closing the loop in single-cell perturbation bio. 🧫
50 today 🎉 Feeling a tad older, but mostly very grateful: to family, friends, colleagues, collaborators, and students for the journey so far! Huge thanks to my department for amazing surprise reception today. You certainly know how to celebrate science & aging in style 😄🚀
Enjoying inspiring discussions with colleagues & friends at the GRC Single Cell Genomics conference in Les Diablerets, surrounded by an awe-inspiring mountain landscape. Special setting for maybe grand ideas!
Excited to share our RegVelo paper in Cell cell.com/cell/fulltext/… We unify RNA velocity + GRNs into one model → better OOD prediction of perturbations (e.g. gene KOs), with examples incl. neural crest KO predictions 🔬 Big thanks to W Wang, Z Hu & T Sauka-Spengler 🙏
1/ Annbatch unlocks terabyte-scale training of biological data in anndata 🚀 Check out our preprint here: arxiv.org/abs/2604.01949 📄 Grab the code on GitHub: github.com/scverse/annbat… Massive shoutout to project leads @felix_f0097 and Ilan Gold for driving this home! 🧵👇
New preprint with Garnett lab 🚀: from descriptive → causal single-cell atlases in CRC.We build the largest CRC atlas (>300 pts, 1.5M cells) using continual learning, and link cell states to causal drivers via Tahoe-100M, validated in organoids! biorxiv.org/content/10.648…
Excited to share our cross-species PDAC atlas preprint led by D Lucarelli & S Parikh in collab with D Saur: biorxiv.org/content/10.648… 1.6M single cells (human + mouse) to quantify how well models capture disease 🧬 Core programs are conserved, even rare immune pops clearly aligned.
Great to be at Roche’s new Institute for Human Biology (IHB) in Basel. Spoke on 'virtual organoids' & predictive models. Inspiring talks from Paola Arlotta, Amy Shyer & Mark Fishman. Exciting convergence of biology, engineering & AI - congrats to Roche on this bold initiative!
At Novartis Campus Basel yesterday for our 2nd Helmholtz Munich × Novartis workshop on advancing AI + multi-modal kidney disease research, from cross-species atlases to targets. Thanks Caroline Gubser-Keller & team for great discussions! helmholtz-munich.de/en/icb/news-de…
View on X: post of 24 Mar 2026Excited to share new preprint with NVIDIA on GPU-accelerated single-cell analysis 🚀 rapids-singlecell brings native GPU support to scverse/AnnData: hours → seconds (1M cells: ~52m → ~25s), scaling to 100M cells. Huge thanks to Severin Dicks 🙌 📄 arxiv.org/abs/2603.02402
🚀 New in Communications Biology: Generative models of cell dynamics - from Neural ODEs to Flow Matching nature.com/articles/s4200… We discuss modeling single-cell dynamics beyond snapshots: from cont-time Neural ODEs to simulation-free flow matching for scalable pop modeling.
Hazel Brugger moderating Google Berlin AI Center Evening party - not just entertaining but compelling w eg Minister D Bär on Germany‘s High Tech Agenda pushing Ai for health, biotech & energy!
🚀 Opening of the Google AI Center Berlin - a strong signal for AI in Europe. Great to join Minister K Wildberger, Mayor K Wegner, Yossi Matias and others to discuss AI in science. Proud that our Helmholtz Munich & TUM teams presented joint work on AI for health!
🗞️ At 'Digitalgipfel' of Süddeutsche Zeitung: sz-gipfel.de/digitalgipfel Germany's Digit. Minister Karsten Wildberger just outlined plans for unified citizen app & digital wallet 🇩🇪, finally! Me contributing to “KI konkret”, about how AI revolution is well underway in biomed.
At the 132nd Internat Titisee Conference on Biology 2.0: The AI Revolution in Biology & Medicine From sequence→function models 🧬 to protein & generative structure models 🧪 to AI of cell states & perturbations 🧫 Great science, great friends, beautiful lake. Thanks @BIFonds!
Join us at Cell Symposia: Single-Cell Biology in the Era of AI (Dec 2–4, 2026, Munich) 🇩🇪 From multi-omics to AI-driven models of cellular dynamics — an exciting lineup across experimental & computational biology. Hope to see you there! 🔗 cell-symposia.com/single-cell-bi…
View on X: post of 24 Feb 2026Looking forward to tonight’s Synapse Munich fireside chat 🔥 Great to connect with the Munich AI x biotech community. Thanks to Nucleate and Amino Collective for the invitation! See you there 🚀 luma.com/ehl0ap32
View on X: post of 24 Feb 2026🚀 From modality-specific to compositional foundation models for cell biology Happy to share our new Perspective in Cell Systems, where we synthesize an emerging trend: moving toward compositional multimodal architectures 🧩 authors.elsevier.com/c/1mdzg8YyDfyN…
Munich takes the top two spots in the FT ranking of Europe’s startup hubs — UnternehmerTUM #1, Start2 Group #2. Strong science, engineering depth, & real bridges between research + entrepreneurship. Huge opportunity ahead in part. for AI + bio/med. 🚀 ft.com/content/ab0548…
View on X: post of 19 Feb 2026Honored to receive today the official membership of the @Leopoldina – Germany’s National Academy of Sciences. “Nunquam otiosus” – never idle. A reminder that science is a continuous responsibility. And proud to be elected together with my AI & ELLIS colleague Sepp Hochreiter.
Where tech meets politics. At the #MSC Startup Hub, innovation & geopolitics collide in real time. Our @Helmholtz_de President Martin Keller is chairing session with former MI6, FBI/Interpol & Ukrainian security leader. Clearly security, crypto & AI are strategic capabilities.
🚀 New preprint: population-aware single-cell dynamics Collab w/ @BertieGottgens lab, led by Weizhong. pseudodynamics+ goes beyond pseudotime to scalably infer birth/death, differentiation & interpolate time - directly from snapshot scRNA-seq. 👉 biorxiv.org/content/10.648…
CellRank protocol now in @NatureProtocols! 🎉 @PhilippWeiler's detailed guide shows how to: - Integrate velocity, pseudotime & time points - Infer cell fate probabilities - Analyze lineage priming at scale Great complement to our CellRank 2 paper! 📖 nature.com/articles/s4159…
A recent @derspiegel article on “one of Germany’s most renowned AI researchers” got me thinking. The person was new to me, but I think highlights a somewhat recurring issue: media visibility is not the same as scientific contribution. spiegel.de/wissenschaft/j…
View on X: post of 4 Feb 2026🚀 Interested in a postdoc in computational biology & AI for neuroscience? The NOMIS Synergy Fellowship offers a great opportunity to develop such a position in my lab within the interdisciplinary Synergy excellence cluster. 🔗 synergy-munich.de/news-events/op…
View on X: post of 3 Feb 2026Congratulations to Matthias Tschöp on his inauguration as President of @LMU_Muenchen! A fitting moment to celebrate 200 years of LMU and to reflect on the responsibility and impact of universities & science in society.
🚀 Excited to share new paper in Nature Genetics: Human Retina Cell Atlas (HRCA) with ~4M cells, >130 retinal cell types, deep scRNA/ATAC integration. Enables cross-species comparisons & GWAS cell-type enrichment. Huge thanks to Ignacio Ibarra & Chen lab. nature.com/articles/s4158…
Exciting Health AI session at #DLD2026 in Munich - with discussions about leveraging AI to integrate scales and design next experiments and treatments! A la DLD motto - it’s gonna get wild - follow at /www.dld-conference.com
A wonderful evening with my wife Michaela at the New Year’s Reception of the Bavarian Government ✨🥂
