Vienna, Austria — Myllia Biotechnology today announced the launch of “Echoes of Silenced Genes,” a new international data science challenge focused on predicting cellular responses to CRISPR perturbation at the transcriptomic level. The initiative addresses computational biologists who develop foundation models of human cells and positions Myllia as a leading provider of high-quality perturbation datasets for the development and benchmarking of virtual cell models.
Virtual cell models aim to predict how cells respond to genetic and environmental perturbations, with the long-term goal of guiding or replacing experimental work. Despite growing interest and despite recent technology advances in artificial intelligence, practical and well-evaluated models remain elusive. Myllia’s challenge directly addresses this gap by combining a realistic prediction task with a newly designed evaluation metric tailored to the sparse nature of single-cell RNA sequencing data.
“Virtual cells will only be as good as the data they are built on,” said Tilmann Buerckstuemmer, Chief Scientific Officer at Myllia Biotechnology. “At Myllia, we generate large-scale CRISPR perturbation datasets in physiologically relevant human cell models. By making parts of this data available through challenges like this, we enable the community to build and rigorously test models that can uncover causal biology and accelerate target discovery.”
The challenge asks participants to predict how a human cell line responds to CRISPR perturbations, based on a combination of public single-cell atlases and perturbation datasets, along with a limited set of perturbed cells provided by Myllia. A central goal is to assess how well current models transfer perturbation effects across cell types.
“This is not just another leaderboard exercise,” said Adam Krejci, VP of Computational Biology at Myllia. “We want to see how far today’s virtual cell models can really go and, just as importantly, how we should evaluate them. That’s why we introduce a new metric and will release predictions alongside ground truth data after the challenge, so the community can scrutinize results using alternative approaches.”
Winners of the “Echoes of Silenced Genes” challenge will be announced at the High-Content CRISPR Screening Conference in March 2026 in Vienna, Austria.
More information on the “Echoes of Silent Genes” challenge
can be found here:
https://www.kaggle.com/competitions/echoes-of-silenced-genes
More information Myllia’s single-cell CRISPR screening platform is available here: https://myllia.com/
More information on the “High-Content CRISPR Screening”
conference can be found here:
https://www.perturb2026.bio/
About Myllia Biotechnology
Myllia Biotechnology is a Vienna-based biotech company combining CRISPR
perturbation screens with single-cell RNA sequencing to deliver mechanistic,
human-relevant insights at scale. By generating custom perturbation datasets,
Myllia enables AI-driven virtual cell models that infer causality, reveal mechanistic
information, and support unbiased discovery of drug targets.
