From Compute to Cure
Inside MXBio’s first cohort of GPU-powered research pilots.
The Research Engine isn’t just a concept - it’s already running. In its first year, MXBio has deployed NVIDIA's accelerated computing stack behind seven pilot programs spanning oncology, neurology, genomics, and pathology, each pairing a Michigan Medicine or College of Engineering investigator with dedicated GPU infrastructure and Michigan's clinical data at scale.
Together, they are early proof of what can happen when generative Bio-AI meets a 20-petabyte health system data commons: faster hypotheses, faster validation, and a direct line from raw biology to real patients.
These pilots are selective by design - chosen for their high computational power requirements,, their cross-disciplinary reach, and their potential to become the foundation models the rest of the field builds on. Explore the first cohort below.
Computational Biology
Virtual Genome — In-Silico Cell Simulation
What if you could simulate genome dynamics before you ever touched a pipette? Virtual Genome merges Michigan’s 3D genome architecture model (ARCH3D) and the Hardwired Genome with NVIDIA Cosmos and Geneformer, fusing live-cell imaging, high resolution microscopy, RNA-seq, and Hi-C data into one unified framework. It's a shift from descriptive biology to life engineering — compressing the discovery timeline for cellular reprogramming and drug interventions from years to days, and laying the groundwork for autonomous, AI-guided laboratories.
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Indika Rajapakse, PhD
Computational Medicine & Bioinformatics, Mathematics, Biomedical Engineering), with NVIDIA Research collaborators
- Lindsey Muir, PhD - Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics
- Ilya Kolmanovsky, PhD - Aerospace Engineering
Imaging, Diagnostics & Pathology
ATLAS — Multimodal Clinical Foundation Model
ATLAS is MXBio's generalist clinical AI: a lightweight, 1-billion-parameter model trained across a secure, 20-petabyte data commons that spans whole-body radiology, pathology, EMR text, lab results, and longitudinal outcomes. Rather than the single-task tools that dominate clinical AI today, ATLAS is built to reason across modalities at once — automating diagnosis, prognosis, and retrieval, and surfacing novel disease biomarkers along the way.
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Todd Hollon, MD
Neurosurgery, Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Computer Science and Engineering
Multimodal Patient Retrieval System
This pilot integrates 20 terabytes of linked imaging, pathology, and clinical records to address a fundamental question: “What happened to patients like this one?” The system is designed to retrieve clinically relevant prior cases in real time, with longitudinal follow-up documenting treatment responses, adverse events, and long-term outcomes. If validated, this approach could support clinical decisions, inform operational planning, and accelerate clinical research.
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Joyce Yan-Ran Wang, PhD
Biomedical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering
Petascale Computational Pathology Platform
Whole-slide pathology imaging holds more biological signals than any one clinician can see. This platform trains foundation models on petabyte-scale whole-slide imaging alongside clinical and genomic data, building toward a multimodal disease atlas — trained inside secure, HIPAA-compliant infrastructure.
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Ulysses G. J. Balis, MD
Pathology & Clinical Informatics
Neurology
Michigan Epilepsy Data Hub
Intracranial EEG data has always been siloed, clinic by clinic. This pilot aims to fix that at scale — pairing a petabyte-scale, multi-institution seizure database with predictive AI models that guide targeted surgical and stimulation therapy. Built in partnership with Stanford, Penn, Duke, ETH Zürich, and others, it's designed to put centralized computational infrastructure that is large enough to provide robust analysis, yet also within reach of smaller clinical sites that could never build it alone.
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William Stacey, MD, PhD
Neurology & Biomedical Engineering
Oncology & Genomics
CANON — Oncology Central Knowledge Platform
Cancer genomics has generated a vast but fragmented record, scattered across institutions, pipelines and reference genomes over two decades. The Canon of Oncology reconciles massive global cancer data within a unified, versioned framework, enabling discovery of hidden associations, rare molecular events and shared mechanisms across cancer types. Continuously revised as methods improve and evidence accumulates, the corpus preserves the provenance of each result, provides a reproducible foundation for discovery and reveals gaps in knowledge that guide future research and investigation.
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Arul Chinnaiyan, M.D., Ph.D.
MXBio Co-Director
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Josh Vo, PhD
Pathology & Michigan Center for Translational Pathology
KHORANA — Transcriptome Foundation Model
KHORANA is a generative cancer genomics model trained directly on raw RNA sequence data — no reference genome, no traditional bioinformatics pipeline. “Raw reads in, biology out.” Scaling from a 12.9-billion-parameter proof of concept to a population-scale model trained across 10,000+ tumor samples, KHORANA is built to power non-invasive liquid biopsy diagnostics and, ultimately, to be released as an open-weight model any lab in the world can query.
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Matthew K. Iyer, MD
Surgery & Pathology
This is the first cohort.
As MXBio's compute and clinical data commons scale, so will the pilots it powers
Interested in building the next one? See open roles on our Careers page, partner with us to expand what Michigan's compute can do.