NEW YORK — The Biswas Family Foundation and the Milken Institute said Tuesday that they have awarded nearly $14 million in grants to support researchers developing artificial intelligence and other computational tools for clinical applications.
According to the nonprofit organizations, the money will go to five groups, including one from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is combining machine learning with single-cell spatial sequencing to help identify target genes for precision metastatic melanoma therapeutics.
Also receiving funding is a Stanford University team developing a chatbot that uses genomic knowledge graphs to help guide the diagnosis of cardiovascular diseases; a group from the Gladstone Institutes that is developing machine-learning models to personalize colorectal and skin cancer diagnosis and treatment; and a Harvard Medical School scientist building an open-data repository of medical imaging data such as chest X-rays and CT scans.
The foundations also awarded a grant to a Harvard Medical School researcher developing an all-disease benchmark for evaluating computational drug repurposing systems comprising pretrained AI models and companion evaluation framework.
The grant projects are set to run for two to three years.
"It is now possible to bring together data from millions of patients, identify new mechanisms of disease, and turn those insights into translational impact," Sanjit Biswas, cofounder of the Biswas Family Foundation and CEO of tech firm Samsara, said in a statement. "We hope this initial investment will support groundbreaking research that will lead to a significant improvement in human health."