Biomni Lab Adds GeneCards Data to Power Grounded Biomedical AI Queries
Phylo’s is strengthening its flagship product, Biomni Lab, by integrating GeneCards data, the widely used human gene knowledge base, directly into its agentic research environment. The integration lets AI agents treat gene identity as a join key across disease associations, tissue expression, protein complexes, pathway memberships, regulatory elements, and protein interactions — work that previously required scientists to manually stitch together results from multiple databases. Every returned data point remains traceable to its original source.
In one example a query for EGFR returned 4,733 ranked interaction partners across seven databases, surfacing core signaling partners (CBL, GRB2, SHC1), downstream effectors (ERBB2, KRAS, MAPK1/3), and tumor suppressors (PTEN, TP53) organized by confidence tier. A second example enriched a 61-gene set from an IFNγ-stimulated macrophage RNA-seq experiment, mapping it to disease hubs like Aicardi-Goutières Syndrome and reconstructing 11 protein complexes across seven functional modules.
About Phylo and Biomni Lab
Phylo is a Stanford spin-out operating as an applied lab focused on agentic AI for biomedical research. BiopharmaTrend The company was built around Biomni, an open-source, general-purpose AI agent for biomedical research launched in June 2024 at Stanford by a team including Kexin Huang (now Phylo’s CEO) and Yuanhao “Jerry” Qu (President), with faculty including Jure Leskovec among the scientific founders. The underlying research paper lists authors from Stanford, Genentech, Arc Institute, and Princeton.
In February 2026, Phylo emerged from stealth with a $13.5 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund — an AI innovation fund created in partnership with Anthropic — with participation from Zetta, Conviction, and SV Angel PR Newswire. Its scientific advisory board includes Nobel laureate Carolyn Bertozzi, CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang, and computational biologist Fabian Theis. Biomni Lab positions itself as the first “Integrated Biology Environment” (IBE), connecting over 300 biomedical databases and tools — including Consensus, COSMIC, Addgene, and Sage Bionetworks’ Synapse platform — into a single agentic workspace. The open-source Biomni project reportedly remains in use by more than 7,000 labs, biopharma companies, and healthcare organizations GenomeWeb, and Ginkgo Bioworks has publicly described using the platform to compress multi-week bioinformatics analyses into hours.
About GeneCards
GeneCards was created in 1997 at the Weizmann Institute of Science’s Crown Human Genome Centre in Rehovot, Israel, to consolidate fragmented gene information scattered across primary sequence databases. Led for decades by Prof. Doron Lancet’s group in the Department of Molecular Genetics, it has grown into a cornerstone resource of the broader GeneCards Suite, which also includes MalaCards (diseases), PathCards (pathways), GeneHancer (regulatory elements), and GeneCaRNA (non-coding RNAs). As of mid-2025 the database covered over 440,000 human gene entries drawn from roughly 200 source databases.
Commercially, LifeMap Sciences acquired exclusive worldwide licensing rights to GeneCards in 2012 through a merger with XenneX, Inc., enabling commercial access while preserving free public availability for academic users. The suite today serves an estimated five to six million users across academic research, pharma, clinical diagnostics, and patent research.
Why it matters
For Phylo, the deal strengthens the “grounding” layer of its agent — the ability to anchor generated answers in curated, citable biomedical knowledge rather than model recall alone. For GeneCards and LifeMap Sciences, the integration extends a nearly three-decade-old database into the emerging workflow of AI-native biology, where agents, rather than humans, are increasingly the primary consumers of structured scientific data. The data integrated feature is live now at biomni.phylo.bio.
