Researchers at Stanford and Chan Zuckerberg Biohub have developed AI-driven virtual labs that emulate the workflows of top-tier scientists to accelerate biological problem-solving. The virtual lab operates with AI principal investigators and agentic AI systems collaborating like human interdisciplinary teams. Demonstrated by devising improved SARS-CoV-2 vaccine strategies in days, this AI innovation heralds faster scientific discovery by leveraging language models that retrieve and analyze complex data. The research, led by James Zou, Ph.D., and detailed in Nature, could transform how biological challenges are approached by augmenting human expertise with autonomous AI agents.