Discovery Dialogues: The Cell Maps for AI Data Generation Project
November 5, 2026, 10:00 - 11:00am ET
The NIH Common Fund’s Discovery Dialogues Webinar Series is designed to highlight groundbreaking NIH Common Fund scientific advances and program outcomes. Each session will spotlight research that is accelerating discovery, fostering collaboration, and expanding what we know about human health and disease.
The next session on November 5, 2026, 10:00-11:00 am ET, will highlight exciting work out of the NIH Common Fund Bridge to Artificial Intelligence (Bridge2AI) Program. Bridge2AI aims to expand the use of super intelligence (SI) in biomedical and health research by generating tools, resources, and richly detailed data that are responsive to SI approaches.
Trey Ideker, Ph.D., Director of the Bridge2AI Cell Maps for AI (CM4AI) Data Generation Project, will discuss the virtual cell models and associated data being generated by the CM4AI project. CM4AI seeks to map the spatiotemporal architecture of human cells and use these maps to interpret cell structure and function in health and disease.
The webinars are open to the public. We invite scientists, trainees, and community partners to connect with cutting-edge Common Fund research. If you have any questions, please email [email protected].
Presenters
Trey Ideker, Ph.D., is the Director of the Big Data Institute at University of Oxford, with joint faculty appointments in the Nuffield Department of Population Health and the Nuffield Department of Medicine. He is also adjunct Professor of Medicine at UC San Diego where he has been on the faculty since 2003. He serves as Director or Co-Director of several international research initiatives and centers, including the Cancer Cell Map Initiative, the Bridge2AI Cell Maps for Artificial Intelligence Data Generation Project, and the ARPA-H Digital Tumors Precision Oncology Center. His laboratory has led seminal studies establishing the theory and practice of systems biology, including systematic techniques for elucidating human cell architecture and its molecular networks. From 2001–present, he produced numerous maps of protein-protein, transcriptional, and genetic networks in model organisms and humans, along with widely used Cytoscape network analysis software. His studies created methodologies that are now core concepts in bioinformatics, including generation of transcriptional networks to explain genome-wide expression patterns, network alignment and evolutionary comparison, and network biomarkers, which enable multigenic definitions of patient subtypes and treatment responses. His lab also introduced experimental network mapping techniques, including synthetic-lethal interaction mapping with CRISPR/Cas9 and characterization of differential interactions across conditions and time. These technologies have broadly informed the mechanisms by which diverse genetic alterations drive cancer, neurological disorders, and drug resistance. Recently he demonstrated an end-to-end pipeline for mapping the structure of human cells over a broad scale range, based on fusion of protein networks with immunofluorescence imaging. He has also recently shown that network maps provide a substrate for deep learning models of cell structure and function, with basic implications for the construction of intelligent systems in precision oncology. He and collaborators showed that large parts of the methylome are remodeled with age, leading to the first epigenetic clock and the rapidly expanding field of epigenetic aging. Finally, Ideker has mentored numerous postdoctoral scholars and graduate students, with many former trainees who have successfully progressed to independent faculty positions.
