Xaira Therapeutics' Chief Operating Officer Jeff Jonker has revealed the AI-driven biotech is focusing its research and development efforts on inflammatory and immunological science. The disclosure marks the first detailed insight into how the company is deploying its capital since raising $1 billion in 2024. The secretive biotech has remained largely quiet about its operations since the fundraise. Jonker's comments to Fierce Biotech provide the first public glimpse into Xaira's strategic priorities as it applies artificial intelligence to drug discovery in areas the pharmaceutical industry considers high-priority therapeutic targets.

Xaira Therapeutics has launched X-Cell, its first virtual cell model, trained on X-Atlas/Pisces, the largest genome-wide CRISPRi Perturb-seq dataset ever reported. The dataset contains 25.6 million perturbed single-cell transcriptomes across seven cellular contexts, more than three times larger than Xaira's previous dataset. X-Cell uses a diffusion language model architecture with 4.9 billion parameters, making it the largest causal perturbation model to date. Unlike traditional autoregressive models, it iteratively refines predictions by progressively replacing control gene expression values with perturbed values, improving accuracy with each step. The model demonstrates state-of-the-art performance in predicting genetic perturbation outcomes, including unseen experiments across different cell types and laboratories. Xaira is making a subset of the dataset and model available to the scientific community.

Xaira Therapeutics announces the appointment of Jeff Jonker as President and Chief Operating Officer.