Tag: drug discovery
James Collins: Doing Good Science with an Underdog Spirit
James Collins is the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering & Science and Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT. Jim serves as a director at the MIT Jameel Clinic, a member of the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences & Technology Faculty, a core founding faculty member of the Wyss Institute, and a member of the Broad Institute. Jim is also an elected member of all three national academies. As one of the founders of synthetic biology, Jim has pioneered research by using synthetic biology and AI to develop next-generation diagnostics and therapeutics, particularly for infectious diseases such as Ebola, Zika, COVID-19 and antibiotic-resistant bacteria (superbugs). Jim has received numerous awards and honors including recognition as a Clarivate Citation Laureate. The technologies from his lab have been licensed by over 25 biotech, pharmaceutical, and medical device companies, and he has also co-founded a number of biotech startups. Learn more
One Survivor’s AI Breakthrough Predicts Cancer Years Ahead
AI Decoded focusses on one of the most urgent, tangible uses of artificial intelligence: health care — we speak to Dr Regina Barzilay, an MIT professor who is building machine-learning AI models to predict disease. She herself was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2014, and has used that experience and knowledge to target her research towards prevention — the AI model she and her team built, named MIRAI, is now able to detect a patient’s risk of developing breast cancer within five years. Are we on the brink of a revolution in treating cancer for everyone? Find out on AI Decoded... Joining presenter Christian Fraser is AI Decoded co-host Stephanie Hare and the BBC's AI correspondent Marc Cieslak Learn more
Meet the newest Forbes 30 under 30
Gabriele Corso was a computer science PhD student at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), where his research focused on the intersection of machine learning and molecular biology. His cofounder Saro Passaro was also a research scientist at MIT and previously worked at Meta. The two have trained AI models for predicting biomolecular structures and how molecules interact within the body, which could eventually help with drug discovery. Used by thousands of global organizations and downloaded more than 1M times, these open source models are the basis for Boltz, a company Corso and Passaro cofounded with Jeremy Wohlwend to improve therapeutic design using AI. Learn more
What will be the first AI-designed drug? These disease-fighting antibodies are top contenders
Antibodies — immune proteins that recognize foreign molecules, such as those made by pathogens, with exquisite specificity — have been a challenge for AI to design. AI models such as AlphaFold have struggled to predict the shape of flexible loop regions of antibodies, which they use to recognize their targets.But new tools developed in the past year — including an updated version of AlphaFold — have proved better at modelling these flexible regions, says Gabriele Corso, a machine-learning scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. Progress in antibody design has followed.
In October, Corso and his colleagues described the BoltzGen model in a preprint, showing that it can adroitly design ‘nanobodies’ — small, simple antibodies resembling molecules made by sharks and camels — against proteins implicated in cancer, viral and bacterial infections and other diseases. In most cases, the researchers identified antibodies with strong target binding after expressing just 15 of the most-promising designs in cells and testing them in laboratory experiments. However, the molecules were not tested in disease models. Learn more
