Arc Institute

A non-profit research institute in Palo Alto that gives scientists long-term, unrestricted funding to pursue high-risk biological research in partnership with Stanford, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco. - Developer of Evo 1 and Evo 2

It took thirteen years and $2.7 billion to read the first human genome. Now a single AI model, trained on 9 trillion DNA base pairs from more than 128,000 species, can predict whether an uncharacterized mutation in a breast cancer gene is dangerous—with 90 percent accuracy—without ever being shown that gene. On March 4, the Arc Institute and NVIDIA published Evo 2 in Nature, the largest biological foundation model ever built: 40 billion parameters, a context window of one million nucleotides, and the ability to design synthetic genomes the size of a simple bacterium.

Updated 2 hours ago

Arc operates on an eight-year funding model designed to enable high-risk research that traditional academic cycles can't support. - Leading AI-driven synthetic biology research

Stanford and Arc Institute researchers used an AI called Evo to write genetic code for 302 bacteriophage viruses from scratch. Sixteen of them worked—they replicated, killed bacteria, and some even outperformed the natural virus they were modeled on. It's the first time a machine has successfully designed complete, functional genomes without human guidance on what genes to include or how to arrange them.

Updated Jan 7