The Krishnaswamy Lab, led by Dr. Smita Krishnaswamy at the Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Genetics, is a key partner in a team that has been awarded an up to $26.7 million grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The funding supports the CATALYST program, a groundbreaking initiative to create a new generation of computational models of human physiology to make drug development safer and more efficient.
The Draper-led team, which also includes Revalia Bio, Inc., and LifeShare Network, will develop computer models that use artificial intelligence and machine learning to simulate human biology. These models aim to predict the safety and effectiveness of new drug candidates, ensuring that only the most promising and safest medicines advance to clinical trials with patients.
At the heart of this project is the development of an integrated “Human Data Stack,” which will combine four distinct layers of human data to create a comprehensive picture of human biology. This includes patient data from electronic medical records, macrophysiological data from donated human organs, cellular and molecular data from biopsies, and microphysiological data from Draper’s PREDICT96 microfluidic system. The Krishnaswamy Lab at Yale will play a crucial role in analyzing this complex, multi-layered data, leveraging their expertise in developing cutting-edge AI and machine learning techniques for biomedical data.
"The ability to test drugs on human tissue platforms before clinical trials is crucial for accelerating drug development. Leveraging in silico models built from human data to predict drug candidates most likely to succeed in human trials could fundamentally transform the drug development process" said Smita Krishnaswamy, Associate Professor of Genetics and of Computer Science.
The research will initially focus on the human liver and kidney, two vital organs for filtering toxins from the body and often susceptible to drug-induced toxicity. The insights gained from these initial studies will lay the groundwork for future expansion to other organ systems.