NeurIPS 2025: Biology’s Transformer Moment
Biology voices weigh in on the impact of AI on drug discovery from the largest NeurIPS research conference to date.
More than 24,000 machine learning experts gathered for the largest Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference to date, hosted against the sunny December backdrop of the San Diego Convention Center. NeurIPS 2025 featured over 5,000 papers accepted from a whopping pool of more than 21,000 submissions.
Among the crowd was a growing life sciences community that attests biology is reaching a transformer moment, mirroring the 2017 publication of “Attention is All You Need,” which paved the way for modern AI architectures, including today’s large language models.
Evan Feinberg, PhD, CEO of Genesis Molecular AI, has watched NeurIPS evolve over recent years with a growing number of attendees filling workshops specifically for AI in sciences.
“The intersection is no longer niche, but rather a major burgeoning field and its own pillar of AI just as much as vision or language has become,” Feinberg told GEN.
Genesis, spun out from the Stanford University lab of Vijay Pande, PhD, formerly partner of a16z Bio + Health and currently co-founder and managing partner of a new venture firm, VZVC. The company’s AI platform integrates diffusion models, language models and physical ML simulations for molecular generation and therapeutic property prediction.
Recently, Genesis unveiled Pearl, a foundation model for protein-ligand cofolding reported to surpass AlphaFold3 in atomic accuracy. The company has also expanded its ML team in recent months, including the appointment of Aleksandra Faust, PhD as chief AI officer and Sergey Edunov as SVP of foundation models.
In clinical translation, Ron Alfa, MD, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Noetik, says the goal of the company is to build foundation models of cancer biology to support patient-level decision making. He emphasizes that the overarching goal of AI-powered biology is to transition from traditional hypothesis driven research to simulating experiments in silico. Aligned with this mission, Noetik houses an in vivo mouse platform that conducts perturbation experiments at scale. The team is currently building a mapping between simulated human data and mouse experiments to assist translation efforts.
