Olivier Elemento, Director of Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, shared on LinkedIn:
“Some big news today: I am deeply honored to receive the NIH Director’s Pioneer Award! This award funds bold, risky ideas, and the NIH only gave out 7 of them this year, across all fields. I am thrilled to get the chance to pursue one.
The idea is to build an AI discovery engine that works alongside scientists.
AI agents will dig through large amounts of pre-clinical and clinical data (some of which we will generate) to come up with new hypotheses about how cancer works. We will then use robots to test many of these hypotheses at once in human cells including in our existing collection of tumor organoids. The results will go back to the AI, which learns from them and decides what to try next. Scientists will stay in the driver’s seat the whole time.
We are starting with lung cancer but plan to apply this paradigm to other cancers too.
A big thank you to my amazing team and colleagues at Weill Cornell Medicine, and to the The National Institutes of Health. You can read more here.”
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