Chinese biotech firms unveil advanced human-centric genomic model

BGI-Research and Zhejiang Lab have launched Genos, an open-source Human-Centric genomic foundation model, at the 20th Annual Meeting of the International Conference on Genomics (ICG-20) in Hangzhou on Thursday.

The model learns directly from high-quality human genomes representing diverse global ancestries and operates at single-nucleotide precision across ultra-long DNA sequences.

Officials say Genos has wide-ranging applications: in public health, it can support disease monitoring and inform targeted preventive measures and healthcare policies; in developmental biology, it helps uncover how genes regulate tissue and organ formation; and in scientific research, it can predict RNA expression from DNA sequences in seconds — a process that previously took weeks or months.

Integrated into BGI's DCS Cloud and the CNGB database, Genos allows researchers to forecast cell expression levels, identify key candidate genes, and accelerate scientific discovery.

For clinical applications, the model works alongside BGI's GeneT deep reasoning model to aid in diagnosing genetic diseases. In personal health, Genos feeds into BGI's BGE platform, generating personalized genomic reports for users.

The core research team behind Genos emerged from the Foundation Model Training Program, a bold cross-disciplinary initiative jointly launched by BGI-Research and Zhejiang Lab. This program brought together bioinformatics experts and computing specialists under a problem-driven, task-oriented training model, fostering the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that is now propelling life science research from data mining toward emergent intelligence.