About the symposium

Now in its second year, the Cell-Cell Symposium brings together a focused community of experimental biologists, bioinformaticians, and technology developers working to understand how cells interact and communicate in real biological systems.

As the field accelerates toward large-scale single-cell and cell-cell interaction atlases, a major bottleneck remains. Dissociated single-cell measurements are difficult to connect back to spatial context in a way that is quantitative, reproducible, and biologically actionable, particularly when linking gene programs to functional influence on neighboring cells. The Cell-Cell Symposium is designed to address this gap by highlighting emerging experimental platforms and computational approaches that connect single-cell and spatial data to predictive models of cell-cell function and response to perturbation.

The meeting emphasizes scalable datasets and integrative methods that enable downstream applications including AI-driven drug discovery, predictive models of cell state and cell-cell interaction, and virtual cell and tissue frameworks for in silico perturbation and simulation.

The Cell-Cell Symposium 2026 will be held in person on March 18–19, 2026, at the California NanoSystems Institute (CNSI) at UCLA. The program will feature invited talks, poster sessions, panel discussions, and structured networking opportunities.

AI-ready datasets • virtual cells • AI drug discovery • cell–cell communication • interaction inference • spatial + single-cell integration • multimodal data • perturbation modeling

Featured 2026 Program Highlights

Download the Full Agenda

Day 1: Symposium | March 18, 2026

Panel: Billion Cell x Cell Project Roadmap (March 18th, Symposium): A forward-looking discussion on what the community needs next: shared priorities, interoperable data, standards and benchmarking, and the path from atlas-scale datasets to clinical and translational impact.

Day 2: Hands-On Nanovial Workshop | March 19, 2026

A practical, guided session focused on implementing and evaluating cell–cell interaction workflows