I

Biological & Cellular Simulation

Cognisom

Pioneering multi-scale cellular digital twins to understand and simulate the foundational building blocks of life — from protein folding to whole-cell dynamics.

Plate IISubstrate, 2025

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§02 — Brief

Cognisom is a multi-year research program building cellular digital twins — computational models of cells fine-grained enough to simulate metabolic, regulatory, and signalling dynamics together.

The premise is straightforward: most biological reasoning still happens at the level of individual pathways. Cognisom asks what becomes possible when those pathways are simulated in concert, at the scale of a whole cell, with enough fidelity to predict the response to a perturbation before any physical experiment is run.

The program is computationally expensive, deliberately reproducible, and committed to releasing both the simulation code and the trained models on an open-access basis. Where industry partnerships are appropriate, the foundation retains derivative-rights to all methods.

§03 — Questions

What the program is asking.

  1. 01

    How accurately can a whole-cell simulation predict drug response in non-cancer cell lines?

  2. 02

    What scale of simulation is required to recover known regulatory motifs from first principles?

  3. 03

    Where do current cellular models silently break down — and how do we instrument those failure modes?

§05 — Apply

Proposals welcome.

The Foundation accepts grant proposals, partnership inquiries, and fellowship applications from researchers whose work intersects with this program.

Plate XIIApplication, 2025