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Figure 4. Major research applications and future goals of virtual cells. (A) Basic cell biology: modeling cell states, state transitions, and gene regulation; (B) Drug discovery and disease research: predicting cellular responses to perturbations, prioritizing candidates for experimental screening, and modeling disease-associated cellular states; (C) Synthetic biology and minimal cell design: supporting genome design, minimal-cell modeling, and model-guided engineering; (D) Tissue microenvironment modeling: incorporating spatial context and cell-cell interactions to simulate multicellular behavior; (E) Personalized medicine and cellular digital twins: a long-term goal of integrating patient-specific biological data into continuously updated models to predict cellular responses to candidate treatments.