Why this model matters
State is Arc Institute's first virtual-cell model: given a starting transcriptome and a perturbation (drug, gene edit or cytokine), it predicts how gene expression will shift. Trained on ~170M observational and 100M+ perturbational cells across 70 contexts, it pairs a State Embedding module with a State Transition transformer. Its 2026 successor, Stack, learns cell biology in-context to generalize to unseen conditions.