Stephen Quake

Our Universal Cell Embedding model, trained on a 36-million-cell dataset from various species and tissues, allows the study of organisms well beyond those in the training set: doi.org/10.1038/s41586… Source: Rosen et al., Nature, 2026

Today: Professor @StephenQuake lecture Join us this evening for Professor Stephen Quake's special lecture on medical innovations from the genome revolution: liquid biopsies. 🗓️ Tonight🕕 18.15–19.30 📍 South Kensington Campus Find out more: bit.ly/4w4A7S4

Excited to share our new paper in @PNASNews. We found that uniform stimuli can trigger highly structured, non-uniform inflammatory responses in tissue and demonstrated that epithelial cells use secondary signaling to orchestrate these spatial patterns. doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2…

I attended #AGCES2026 in Vegas last month. The 7 to 11-year delay for an endometriosis diagnosis is a systemic failure we should be able to solve with better measurement. youtube.com/watch?v=iwxgeI…

Aging isn't just a dimmer switch; it’s a logistics failure. In @NatureAging, Doug Henze, Tony Wyss-Coray, and I show how mRNA "gets stuck" in aging microglia, causing degradation of their spatial context: nature.com/articles/s4358…

How do cells balance competing tasks? In @PNASNews, George Crowley, Uri Alon, and I apply Pareto optimality to the Tabula Sapiens atlas to reveal the geometric "archetypes" of human cell type diversity: pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.10…

I enjoyed speaking at #PMWC2026 on the transition from data to knowledge. We’re using foundation models like UCE and Transcriptformer to move beyond the "parts list" toward true clinical digital twins. As Sydney Brenner said: “Don't confuse data with knowledge.”

One of the things I’m proud of from my time at CZI was launching a physician-scientist training program. A new paper in The Journal of Pediatrics by the program leaders shows how cohort-based training can build skills, confidence, and scientific identity: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41565006/

Honored to have given the Ahlquist Keynote at @MayoClinic and to highlight David Ahlquist’s pioneering work on universal cancer screening. Fig. 2 from his paper beautifully shows why aggregating prevalence changes the screening calculus. (Ahlquist, Precision Oncology, 2018)

I spoke at the @takeda_sci Symposium on “Organoid 4D: Development, Disease, Diversity, and Discovery.” Excellent discussions on organoid systems, tissue self-organization, and their growing role in modeling development and disease. #Organoids #StemCells Photos by Tsuyoshi Maekawa

I spoke with @ZMEScience at #FallingWalls about bringing precision measurement into biology – from microfluidics and non-invasive prenatal testing to cell atlases and virtual cells. Read or listen to the interview: zmescience.com/feature-post/p…

Caught the @bruce_munro's immersive light installations at Sensorio in Paso Robles recently – a beautiful reminder of how art, technology, and landscape can create something truly inspiring.

Great visit to @ucsdbe, the Bioengineering department at @UCSD. Inspiring discussions and a pleasure to meet the students and faculty under the watchful eye of Do Ho Suh's Fallen Star.

Photo credit: © Falling Walls Foundation

Spoke at #FallingWalls on “Precision Health: Advancing Medicine and Care With AI.” The genome isn’t a blueprint—we need multimodal, human-first data and solid pre-analytics so AI can better guide care. Watch: youtube.com/watch?v=J9gqNE…

Photo credit: © Falling Walls Foundation

Thanks to @ChristineCustis (@the_IAS) for a thoughtful Falling Walls dialogue on AI and society. We discussed AI for the Human Cell Atlas, automating cell-type annotation, and responsible use. Grateful to the @KavliFoundation & the Rita Allen Foundation.

AbCellera Appoints Dr. Stephen Quake to its Board of Directors investors.abcellera.com/news/news-rele…

Synthetic biology may sound like science fiction, but it's happening right here in Seattle. In the latest episode of #LabNotes, leaders of this movement share how it's changing how we think about cells, disease, and the future of medicine. 🔗 alleninstitute.org/news/lab-notes…

“It’s going to be a very powerful tool for understanding what goes wrong in disease,” says @StephenQuake. “Our goal is to create computational tools so that cell biology goes from being 90% experimental and 10% computational to the other way around.” nature.com/articles/d4158…