AI and biology

Advances in AI will dramatically accelerate biological discovery, turbo-charge the identification of new therapeutic targets, and reshape medicine. But for this to happen, the research community needs to generate high-quality data needed to produce meaningful insights about human health and disease. The Broad is at the center of efforts to bring AI and the life sciences together to fully harness AI and build foundational capabilities that will allow researchers everywhere to decode biology. Among the Broad’s key efforts in AI are:

• The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Center is developing principled machine-learning approaches and partnering with experimental biologists to uncover fundamental insights into normal and disease biology. The Center is also training the next generation of leaders who are fluent in both AI and biology.

• The Machine Learning for Health (ML4H) initiative is bringing together AI researchers and clinical investigators to apply machine learning to deidentified patient data, including medical imaging and clinical records, to improve risk prediction and inform earlier diagnoses.

• A group of Broad investigators is developing agentic AI systems as scientific collaborators that can accelerate research by supporting scientists in generating hypotheses, analyzing data, and advancing discovery.

Across the Broad, scientists are also pioneering new machine learning methods and designing experiments to generate the structured, high-quality data that new AI tools need to achieve real scientific breakthroughs. These are just some examples of how the Broad is building the foundation for the fast-emerging field of AI and biology and powering the next wave of scientific discovery.