A full-stack institute for AI and biology research.
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Arc Institute is a nonprofit research organization founded on the belief that many important scientific programs can be enabled by new organizational models.
Arc’s mission is to accelerate scientific progress, understand the root causes of complex diseases, and narrow the gap between discoveries and impact on patients. Arc operates in partnership with Stanford University, UCSF, and UC Berkeley.
Arc provides scientists with multi-year funding to work on their most important ideas and invests in the rapid development of experimental and computational technological tools.
As individuals, Arc researchers collaborate across diverse disciplines to advance our understanding—and eventual treatment—of complex diseases, including cancer, neurodegeneration, and immune dysfunction.
Featured Research
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Virtual Cell Challenge 2026: Benchmarking zero-shot generalization across cellular contexts
The Virtual Cell Challenge returns in 2026 with a more demanding test of biological generalization: zero-shot prediction across multiple independent cellular contexts. Participants will build models to predict gene knockdown responses in a new Arc-generated dataset comprising unseen cell lines.
Structural mechanism governing the directionality of bridge recombination
Bridge recombinases from the IS110 family of transposons, such as IS621, associate with a bridge RNA (bRNA) to mediate programmable recombination. Here we show that bRNA is weakly expressed from IS621 loci in the E. coli genome and that the IS621 recombinase–bRNA complex mediates excision less efficiently than insertion.
Generative design of bacteriophages with genome language models
Many important biological functions arise not from single genes but from complex interactions encoded by entire genomes. We report the first generative design of complete bacteriophage genomes using genome language models. We generated viable bacteriophages with target host tropism, using the phage ΦX174 as our design template.
Intestinal interoceptive dysfunction drives age-associated cognitive decline
Here, by charting a high-resolution map of microbiome ageing and its functional consequences throughout the lifespan of mice, we identify a mechanism by which inhibition of gut–brain signalling during ageing results in impaired neuronal activation in the hippocampus and loss of memory encoding.
Genome modelling and design across all domains of life with Evo 2
AI models that learn information from genomic sequences have advanced prediction and design capabilities. Here we introduce Evo 2, a biological foundation model trained on 9 trillion DNA base pairs from a highly curated genomic atlas spanning all domains of life to have a 1 million token context window with single-nucleotide resolution.
Vitamin B2 and B3 nutrigenomics reveals a therapy for NAXD disease
Vitamins are essential metabolites that must be obtained from external sources. In modern times, they have become widely available, leading to their ad hoc consumption. We developed a nutritional genomics framework to systematically identify monogenic diseases responsive to micronutrient modulation.
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