# Xaira Therapeutics

**Type:** company
**Stage:** Private biotech
**Focus:** AI-driven drug discovery powered by Virtual Cell technology

## Description

Xaira is building the data and model infrastructure for a true Virtual Cell — specifically by generating causally rich, contextually diverse perturbation data at scale. The bet: the bottleneck for the next generation of AI drug discovery is not model architecture but data quality and causal diversity.

## Strategic thesis

Current AI drug discovery models (including most foundation models) train on observational scRNA-seq data from CellxGene — largely cancer cell lines in standard conditions. This data is correlational, not causal, and lacks the context diversity needed for genuine out-of-distribution generalization.

Xaira's approach: generate the perturbation atlas the field needs — systematic, multi-context, multi-modal.

## Connections

- [../entities/bo-wang.md](bo-wang.md) — key scientific leader
- [../concepts/virtual-cell.md](../concepts/virtual-cell.md) — the technology being built
- [../concepts/perturbation-biology.md](../concepts/perturbation-biology.md) — the data strategy