HHMI invests $500 million in AI-driven life sciences research

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute today announced AI@HHMI, a $500 million investment over the next 10 years to support artificial intelligence-driven projects in the life sciences. As the largest private biomedical research organization in the United States, HHMI aims to explore the full promise of AI to accelerate scientific discovery at its Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, Virginia, and at the more than 300 HHMI-affiliated labs.

“By bringing human curiosity and artificial intelligence closer together at every phase of experimentation and data collection, we hope to enable a wide range of scientific breakthroughs at our Janelia Research Campus and HHMI labs throughout the country,” said HHMI President Erin O’Shea. 

While AI@HHMI will be centered at Janelia, it will drive AI-focused collaborations across the broader HHMI community. Through this effort, hundreds of HHMI scientists will help design and execute a wide range of ambitious AI-based biomedical research projects.

AI@HHMI will adopt an approach to research dubbed “AI-in-the-Loop,” which will place AI at the heart of the scientific process to accelerate discovery and catalyze an explosion of knowledge about the complexities of life. AI systems will be used to help design experiments, build automated pipelines, collect high-quality “AI-ready” data, and create generalizable learning models capable of inferring underlying principles within that data.

“Our scientists will reimagine the research process,” said Janelia Executive Director Nelson Spruston. “As always at HHMI, people will remain at the center of this initiative. Multidisciplinary teams will collaborate to design, execute, and interpret experiments. By sharing the tools and results, we aim to transform and accelerate the discovery process, not just at HHMI, but around the world.”

For 15 years, HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus has been at the forefront of AI-driven research applied to biology. Janelia scientists have built machine-learning systems to tackle a host of challenges in the life sciences and, previously, Janelia partnered with Google to apply AI systems to biology, both through their Connectomics group and DeepMind. These efforts have yielded a range of significant breakthroughs, including the first detailed map of an adult fly brain, a milestone technological achievement with direct implications for neuroscience research.

“Janelia’s unique strength is the tight collaboration between theorists, experimentalists, computational scientists, and engineers that allows us to develop theoretical and computational models and collect high-quality experimental data to train and validate them,” said Stephan Saalfeld, Janelia Senior Group Leader and Head of Computation and Theory.

To kick off the first phase of this investment, through October 4, 2024, AI@HHMI is inviting proposals for AI-based research projects led by HHMI Investigators, Freeman Hrabowski Scholars, and Janelia Group Leaders. Accepted projects will be fully funded by HHMI and executed at Janelia in collaboration with HHMI labs as well as a new team of AI scientists, AI engineers, robotics engineers, and data scientists.

More information about AI@HHMI is available online at ai.hhmi.org.

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HHMI is the largest private biomedical research institution in the nation. Our scientists make discoveries that advance human health and our fundamental understanding of biology. We also invest in transforming science education into a creative, inclusive endeavor that reflects the excitement of research. HHMI’s headquarters are located in Chevy Chase, Maryland, just outside Washington, DC.