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

By bringing human curiosity and artificial intelligence closer together at every stage of experimentation and data collection, we hope to enable a wide range of scientific breakthroughs at our Janelia Research Campus and in HHMI labs across the country.”

Erin O’Shea, HHMI President

While based in Janelia, AI@HHMI will drive AI-focused collaborations across the HHMI community. As part of this effort, hundreds of HHMI scientists will help design and execute a wide range of ambitious AI-based biomedical research projects.

AI@HHMI will pursue a research approach called “AI-in-the-Loop,” which puts AI at the center of the scientific process to accelerate discovery and catalyze an explosion of knowledge about the complexity of life. AI systems will be used to design experiments, build automated pipelines, collect high-quality “AI-ready” data, and build generalizable learning models capable of inferring underlying principles from that data.

“Our scientists will reimagine the research process,” said Nelson Spruston, Janelia’s executive director. “As always at HHMI, people will be at the heart of this initiative. Multidisciplinary teams will work together to design, conduct and interpret experiments. By sharing the tools and results, we aim to transform and accelerate the discovery process, not only at HHMI, but around the world.”

For 15 years, HHMI’s Janelia Research Campus has been a leader in AI-powered research in biology. Janelia scientists have developed machine learning systems to address a variety of challenges in the life sciences. Previously, Janelia collaborated with Google to apply AI systems in biology, both through the Connectomics group and DeepMind. These efforts resulted in a number of significant breakthroughs, including the first detailed map of the brain of an adult fly, a milestone technological achievement with direct implications for neuroscience research.

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

To kick off the first phase of this investment, AI@HHMI invites proposals for AI-based research projects led by HHMI investigators, Freeman Hrabowski Fellows, and Janelia group leaders through October 4, 2024. Accepted projects will be fully funded by HHMI and conducted at Janelia in collaboration with HHMI labs and a new team of AI scientists, AI engineers, robotics engineers, and data scientists.