A team led by Marinka Zitnik, associate professor of biomedical informatics in the Blavatnik Institute at Harvard Medical School, has received a grant of nearly $7 million from Cancer Grand Challenges to create artificial intelligence (AI) “co-scientists” that help cancer researchers analyze data, generate hypotheses, and suggest new experiments, speeding new knowledge and therapies.
The project, known as AURORA, includes an additional $4 million to three international teams across Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, which will evaluate the effectiveness of the “co-scientists” in their ongoing studies of next-generation CAR T-cell therapies, cancer initiation, and tumor-immune interaction.