Dr. Olivier Elemento Wins NIH Director’s Pioneer Award

Dr. Olivier Elemento, the director of the Englander Institute for Precision Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine, has been awarded an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award to build an artificial intelligence (AI) tool to accelerate cancer research, starting with lung cancer.

Part of the Common Fund’s High-Risk, High-Reward Research program, the award supports scientists with outstanding records of creativity to develop pioneering approaches to major biomedical challenges. Only seven such awards were issued this year. The five-year, nearly $6 million grant will fund an AI-human discovery engine that uses large language model agents, such as those used in AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT, to generate hypotheses from human cell and tissue data. The system will then test the hypotheses using robotics testing platforms that can run hundreds to thousands of experiments in parallel on human cells or organoids, miniature three-dimensional tumors grown from patients’ own cells.

“It’s a real honor and a privilege to receive this award,” said Dr. Elemento, who is a professor of systems and computational biomedicine and a member of the Sandra and Edward Meyer Cancer Center at Weill Cornell Medicine. “It will support the creation of an AI system to drive research from the initial data analysis through the validation stage, with human scientists’ oversight.”

Image Credit: Brad Trent / Article Source: Weill Cornell Medicine Office of External Affairs

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