Google’s new AI reveals hidden genetic clues in new immune-cell test
Google DeepMind announced AlphaGenome 2 on November 11, 2026, a DNA prediction model designed to show how genetic changes act in specific cell types and states.
The original AlphaGenome produced fixed parallel outputs across tissues and experiments from a million-letter DNA sequence. AlphaGenome 2 instead takes a target condition, such as a tissue, cell type or cell state, alongside the sequence and uses that condition throughout its architecture, according to DeepMind.
DeepMind reports training the model on bulk and single-cell data from human and mouse samples, including more than 107 million individual cell profiles. The profiles supply training material for learning how DNA activity varies across biological settings.
Improved Disease Detection
On TenK10K, a dataset covering 28 primary immune-cell types, DeepMind reports that AlphaGenome 2 identified 30% of causal variants in the evaluation, compared with 16% for the original AlphaGenome fine-tuned on single-cell data. These developer-reported benchmark results measure variant identification, not diagnostic accuracy or a person's disease risk.
Cell-specific predictions can focus experiments on effects broad tissue averages may miss.
Bowel Disease Example
The bowel-disease example makes the distinction concrete. In its Nov. 11 announcement, DeepMind says AlphaGenome 2 computationally reproduced a finding involving a regulatory variant that increases activity of the ETS2 gene in gut macrophages, a type of immune cell.
The model singled out the variant and predicted its selective effect on ETS2 in those macrophages, with other cell types and genes largely unaffected. The useful clue is the combination of variant, gene and cell type: it points to a specific cellular setting for investigating the effect.
Research Tool Only
DeepMind also says researchers can supply single-cell gene-activity data to condition predictions on newly observed states without retraining the model. The system can then predict properties that were not measured, helping scientists decide which experiments to prioritize.
The company-reported research predictions. The ETS2 mechanism predates this model. AlphaGenome 2 has not been validated or approved for clinical or diagnostic use.
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