Biophysical Society Bulletin | February 2026

Public Affairs

NIH Launches New Center to Standardize Organoid Models

decision-makers’ confidence. Test scenarios ranged from multi-virus coinfection models to assessing the impact of targeted vaccination campaigns. Many ASKEM products, including the Terarium modeling workbench, are now open source. DARPA is exploring adoption across health, defense, and intelligence agencies, positioning these tools to support faster, clearer modeling during future outbreaks. Around the World Russia Pledges Major R&D Boost; Scientists Remain Skeptical Russia has announced plans to more than triple its research spending over the next five years, with total investment set to reach 6.2 trillion rubles ($80 billion) by 2030, up from 2 trillion rubles today. Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Chernyshenko said that nearly 60% of the funding would come from government sources—down from over 90% currently—with private indus try contributing the remainder. The increase is intended to help the country achieve President Vladimir Putin ’s long-term goal of investing 2% of GDP in research and development. Despite the ambitious targets, many scientists doubt that they are achievable. Russia’s research spending has fallen in recent years, from 0.51% of GDP in 2020 to just 0.36% in 2024, and the country faces significant economic constraints. Observers warn that turning the government’s plan into reality may be a formidable challenge. Be an inspiration to your community and help change the lives of those interested in or studying science. Sign up to be a mentor, K-12 classroom visitor, speaker, science fair judge, or student chapter sponsor. Access to the network is free for all BPS members and non-members. Use Your Expertise to Make a Difference!

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has awarded $87 mil lion to establish the Standardized Organoid Modeling (SOM) Center, a new national hub designed to create reliable, repro ducible organoid models for biomedical research. The center will be based at the Frederick National Laboratory for Cancer Research, supported by the National Cancer Institute. Organoids—miniature, lab-grown tissues that mimic human organs—are increasingly valuable alternatives to animal models. However, because most are produced through trial-and-error methods in individual labs, reproducibility has lagged. The SOM Center aims to change that by us ing AI, robotics, and diverse human cell sources to develop standardized organoid models that can be broadly used by researchers and accepted by regulators. NIH Director Jay Bhat tacharya called the initiative a major step toward advancing human-based research tools, improving disease modeling, accelerating drug discovery, and reducing reliance on animals. The center will make its protocols, data, and organoids openly available to academic, industry, and government scientists, as well as clinicians seeking patient-specific models. It will also collaborate with the Food and Drug Administration to ensure that models meet preclinical testing standards. Initial efforts will focus on liver, lung, heart, and intestinal organoids, with plans to expand into additional tissues and disease areas. AI Tools Aim to Speed and Simplify Outbreak Modeling The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted how slow and opaque traditional disease-spread models can be. Many rely on vast legacy code bases that are hard to update quickly when new scientific insights emerge. The Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has a program, Automating Scientific Knowl edge Extraction and Modeling (ASKEM), which was launched in 2022, that aims to provide a solution with AI tools that build and update scientific models faster and more transpar ently. The systems can read research papers or ingest Jupyter notebooks, extract the underlying math, and assemble mod els at a higher level of scientific abstraction. Researchers can focus on biology and behavior instead of wrestling with code. Independent testing showed that the tools can create models 83% faster than standard workflows, while making assump tions and mechanisms easier to understand—boosting

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February 2026

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