Prima Mente

Introducing In-Context Module discovery (ICM): interpretable gene modules for comparing cell states across datasets. ICM is the latest advance for our virtual cell modelling framework: Parthenon.

ICM learns from primary human cells across 66 datasets and adapts its modules to new contexts without retraining.

In microglia, ICM recovers known state signatures, reveals unexpected cellular features in experimental models, and helps explain why a specific perturbation strongly shifts gene expression in one model and barely in another.

This gives biologists better tools choose perturbations and design better in vitro experiments.

Introducing Pleiades-Neuron: a new model that can identify neuronal cell-free DNA in blood, achieving a part-per-million threshold.

When neurons die, they release fragments of DNA into the bloodstream but at extremely low concentrations.

Our model distinguishes neuron-derived cell-free DNA at levels as low as one part-per-million. It is 4.4× more sensitive than existing methods, and in early tests across patient samples demonstrated utility across a number of brain-related conditions.

Performance improved as we scaled the size of our training corpus. It also improved with model size, with no plateau yet based on probing experiments up to 7B parameters.

This could enable simple blood tests for earlier detection, prognostic monitoring, and treatment response determination in diseases of and injuries to the brain.

Congratulations to @thernabio on the launch of RNA-Logix™ and BioReason-RNA today. We are proud to support Therna and their customers in turning biological questions into testable hypotheses.

We are excited to announce that @nvidia has committed to an investment in @PrimaMente.

Built upon years of close collaboration, this investment deepens our partnership and strengthens our ambition to tackle complex diseases.

Neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and ALS remain among medicine’s greatest unmet needs. Making real progress requires global coordination around data, foundation models, and experimental and clinical validation.

We are grateful to @nvidia for their commitment and look forward to deepening our partnership as we pursue breakthrough discoveries for these diseases, and beyond.

Today we're launching the Alzheimer's Translation Challenge, a global AI competition to discover new therapeutic hypotheses for Alzheimer's disease.

At its core is a new 150M cell atlas of neurons, astrocytes, and microglia across different genetic backgrounds under combinatorial perturbations, with multi-modal readouts.

The data will be made available through the AD workbench, Hugging Face and Prima Mente's modeling platform.

The challenge is led by @PrimaMente and @AlzData in collaboration with @nvidia, @huggingface, @nebiusai, Talisman Therapeutics, @UltimaGenomics, @cellanome, @PrimeIntellect, @GoodfireAI, and @boltz_bio.

In 1906, Alois Alzheimer described a new disease of the brain. After 120 years of progress, we still don't fully understand what drives this disease. We want to change that.

Participants will use the dataset to build AI models, assessed through a series of evals from general benchmarks to more complex tasks.

Top teams will be shortlisted, and their experimental hypotheses tested in Prima Mente's wet lab. Teams win when their hypotheses demonstrate the predicted molecular and functional effect.