Generative AI for Life Science

Generative AI has become both highly prevalent and highly divisive. While public opinion varies, rapid advancement in GenAI is transforming the life sciences, enabling new approaches to understand biological systems, predict molecular structures and advance clinical diagnostics.

In this workshop, we will demonstrate how GenAI is applied across key life science domains through four interactive sessions. Participants will train models, explore biological datasets and generate real outputs such as synthetic cell images, protein structure predictions, and mRNA sequences for vaccines. By the end of the workshop, you will have hands-on experience in developing GenAI techniques and applying them to solve real-world life science problems.

Prerequisites

  • Basic understanding of Python programming

  • Familiarity with machine learning concepts

  • Interest in life science applications

Setup

The lesson

Reference

Learning outcomes

This material is for researchers and practitioners in life sciences who want to learn about generative AI applications.

By the end of this module, learners should:

  • Understand what generative AI is and how generative models (autoencoders, transformers and multimodal systems) are applied to biological data.

  • Hands-on experience training and using models for:

    • Image analysis and reconstruction (autoencoders).

    • Protein feature extraction and structure prediction (protein language models).

    • Drug discovery (codon prediction).

  • Understand key concepts such as latent space representations, intermediate embeddings and attention mechanisms.

  • Experience with real biomedical datasets including X-ray images and protein sequences.

  • Methods for evaluating models with practical metrics, visualisations and interpretability tools (e.g. saliency maps).

See also

Credit

This workshop was developed by Sweden AI Factory for life science researchers and practitioners.

Don’t forget to check out additional course materials from the Sweden AI Factory lesson library.

License

CC BY-SA for media and pedagogical material

Copyright © 2026, Sweden AI Factory, Luca Panconi, Ashwin Mohanan, Fatemeh Rahimian, António Brito. . This material is released by Sweden AI Factory under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0).

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Copyright (c) 2026, Sweden AI Factory, Luca Panconi, Ashwin Mohanan, Fatemeh Rahimian, António Brito.

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