Daniel Levine

Topic: AI-driven Virtual Cell Models for Drug Discovery

Project Summary: Cell2Sentence (C2S) is a multimodal virtual cell foundation model that integrates single-cell, perturbational, and textual data to enable natural-language exploration of cellular mechanisms. This proposal will leverage C2S to target age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of irreversible vision loss marked by angiogenesis and inflammation, where treatment responses remain heterogeneous. The three aims are: (1) integrate AMD single-cell, spatial, bulk and literature data to define cell states, networks and disease drivers; (2) deploy a multibillion-parameter C2S model for rapid virtual screening of more than 30,000 public and Boehringer compounds, predicting cell-specific responses; and (3) experimentally validate key perturbations in ex vivo human retinal cultures with a lab-in-the-loop AI agent. Expected outcomes include novel targets, prioritized compounds, and a generalizable platform extendable to other chronic diseases.

Biography: Daniel Levine is the Yale–Boehringer Ingelheim Postdoctoral Fellow in the Van Dijk Lab at Yale School of Medicine. He earned his PhD in Mathematics from Penn State University, specializing in algebraic geometry and moduli spaces of vector bundles, then worked as a machine learning engineer at a cybersecurity startup. Since joining the lab in 2023, he has developed the Cell2Sentence (C2S) virtual cell platform and pursued research in flow matching and operator learning. His current work explores AI agents and multimodal foundation models for virtual cells and drug discovery.

Yale-Mentor Professor David van Dijk, BI-Mentor Dr. Boris Alexander Bartholdy