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! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
Excited to share our cross-species PDAC atlas preprint led by D Lucarelli & S Parikh in collab with D Saur: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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!
www.helmholtz-munich.de/en/icb/news-...
Excited 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
www.nature.com/articles/s42...
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:
www.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.
How to learn gene regulation patterns from multimodal single-cell data? To answer this question, we at OpenProblems organised the Kaggle competition on modality prediction. It ran back in 2022 but still remains the world's largest competition in the single-cell field. 1/17
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 the #CellPressSymposia: Decoding cellular complexity: Single cell biology in the era of AI, Dec 2–4, 2026, Munich, Germany, in partnership with @helmholtzmunich.bsky.social.
#CPSsinglecellbiology2026 @ethz.ch.bsky.social
http://dlvr.it/TR8Rw9
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!
🔗 www.cell-symposia.com/single-cell-...
Looking 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
We discuss anchoring strategies, generative transport, cross-modality attention, and integrating priors (GRNs, ontologies, pathways, spatial context).
Compositionality may also help bridge scales → toward “virtual cell” systems 🤖
Thanks to Mojtaba Bahrami for leading this 🙌
Core idea: build multimodal single-cell FMs modularly, combine expert models (RNA, ATAC, proteomics, imaging, text) via attention interfaces.
Why? Paired multimodal data are rare.
Unimodal data are abundant.
Modalities are often complementary, not redundant 🧬
🚀 From modality-specific to compositional foundation models for cell biology
Happy to share our new Perspective in Cell Systems.
We describe an emerging shift toward compositional multimodal architectures 🧩
authors.elsevier.com/c/1mdzg8YyDf...
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. 🚀
www.ft.com/content/ab05...
Honored to receive today the official membership document of the @Leopoldina – Germany’s National Academy of Sciences – in Halle.
“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.
Looking forward to “Europe’s Fight for BioTech.”
AI is no longer a tool around biotech - it’s becoming the core engine. Pharma is turning into techbio: data-driven, model-based, AI-native.
Biotech = software-defined biology.
Can Europe move fast enough?
www.unternehmertum.de/en/landingpa...
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/ Bertie Göttgens’ lab, led by Weizhong.
pseudodynamics+ goes beyond pseudotime to infer birth/death, differentiation & interpolate time in scalable fashion - directly from snapshot scRNA-seq.
👉 www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...
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!
📖 www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Did you catch our recent Protocol describing the inference of cell fate from single-cell RNA sequencing data using CellRank?
🧪 @natprot.nature.com @fabiantheis.bsky.social
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.
www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft...
🚀 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.
🔗 www.synergy-munich.de/news-events/...
Congratulations 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.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
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 ✨🥂