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News & Stories

Read the latest news from the Foundation and the science stories capturing our attention.

A selection of news, stories, and perspectives from the Foundation and trusted voices in the field highlighting how technology-driven innovations are shaping the future of global health.

Press Release

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Biswas Family Foundation Transformative Computational Biology Grant Awardees: Milken Institute Press Release

The Biswas Family Foundation and the Milken Institute announce the five research teams selected to receive funding in the first cycle of the Transformative Computational Biology Grant Program. Nearly $14 million has been allocated to projects utilizing computational tools in various fields such as cardiovascular disease diagnosis, precision oncology treatments, improving clinical data sets, and drug repurposing all aiming to bridge the gap between research and practice in healthcare.

Publications

The following publications discuss work from Biswas Family Foundation funded projects.
July 15, 2025

Learning Universal Representations of Intermolecular Interactions with ATOMICA

bioRxiv
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Associated Project:
AI for Cancer Genomic Medicine: Circuitry, Treatment, Personalization
Principal Investigator:

Manolis Kellis, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Category:
Manuscript
July 7, 2025

SPATIA: Multimodal Model for Prediction and Generation of Spatial Cell Phenotypes

arXiv
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Associated Project:
AI for Cancer Genomic Medicine: Circuitry, Treatment, Personalization
Principal Investigator:

Manolis Kellis, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Category:
Manuscript
June 29, 2025

Multimodal Medical Code Tokenizer

arXiv
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Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Manuscript
June 11, 2025

One Patient, Many Contexts: Scaling Medical AI Through Contextual Intelligence

arXiv
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Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Manuscript
June 4, 2025

ReXVQA: A Large-scale Visual Question Answering Benchmark for Generalist Chest X-ray Understanding

arXiv
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Associated Project:
The MAIDA Initiative: Democratizing Global Medical Imaging Data Sharing for Safer and Fairer AI
Principal Investigator:

Pranav Rajpurkar, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Manuscript
June 3, 2025

Controllable Sequence Editing for Biological and Clinical Trajectories

arXiv
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Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Manuscript
May 10, 2025

ReXGradient-160K: A Large-Scale Publicly Available Dataset of Chest Radiographs with Free-text Reports

arXiv
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Associated Project:
The MAIDA Initiative: Democratizing Global Medical Imaging Data Sharing for Safer and Fairer AI
Principal Investigator:

Pranav Rajpurkar, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Manuscript
May 7, 2025

ClinVec: Unified Embeddings of Clinical Codes Enable Knowledge-Grounded AI in Medicine

medRXiv
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Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Manuscript
May 5, 2025

Generalizable AI Predicts Immunotherapy Outcomes Across Cancers and Treatments

medRxiv
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Associated Project:
AI for Cancer Genomic Medicine: Circuitry, Treatment, Personalization
Principal Investigator:

Manolis Kellis, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Category:
Manuscript
April 27, 2025

Neighborhood Nonnegative Matrix Factorization Identifies Patterns and Spatially-Variable Genes in Large-Scale Spatial Transcriptomics Data

bioRxiv
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Associated Project:
Biswas Center for Transformative Computational Cancer Biology
Principal Investigator:

Katherine Pollard, PhD, Director of Data Science & Biotechnology, Gladstone Institutes

Category:
Manuscript
March 14, 2025

TxAgent: An AI Agent for Therapeutic Reasoning Across a Universe of Tools

arXiv
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Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Manuscript
March 4, 2025

Multimodal AI Predicts Clinical Outcomes of Drug Combinations from Preclinical Data

arXiv
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Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Manuscript
January 22, 2025

KGARevion: An AI Agent for Knowledge-Intensive Biomedical QA

ICLR 2025 Conference
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Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Manuscript
December 15, 2024

ProCyon: A Multimodal Foundation Model for Protein Phenotypes

bioRxiv
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Associated Project:
Artificial intelligence for Genomic Medicine: Circuitry, Treatment, Personalization
Principal Investigator:

Manolis Kellis, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Category:
Manuscript
December 10, 2024

Unified Clinical Vocabulary Embeddings for Advancing Precision

medRxiv
Green circular redirect arrow icon pointing to the right
Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School 

Category:
Manuscript
November 21, 2024

Cellular Behavior Analysis from Live-Cell Imaging of TCR T Cell-Cancer Cell Interactions

bioRxiv
Green circular redirect arrow icon pointing to the right
Associated Project:
Biswas Center for Transformative Computational Cancer Biology
Principal Investigator:

Katherine Pollard, PhD, Director of Data Science & Biotechnology, Gladstone Institutes

Category:
Manuscript
November 15, 2024

Efficient Generation of Protein Pockets with PocketGen

Nature Machine Intelligence
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Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School 

Category:
Manuscript
November 12, 2024

Signals in the Cells: Multimodal and Contextualized Machine Learning Foundations for Therapeutics

NeurIPS AIDrugX
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Associated Project:
AI for Cancer Genomic Medicine: Circuitry, Treatment, Personalization
Principal Investigator:

Manolis Kellis, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Category:
Manuscript
October 31, 2024

Empowering Biomedical Discovery with AI Agents

Cell
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Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School 

Category:
Manuscript
August 29, 2024

ReXamine-Global: A Framework for Uncovering Inconsistencies in Radiology Report Generation Metrics

arXiv
Green circular redirect arrow icon pointing to the right
Associated Project:
The MAIDA Initiative: Democratizing Global Medical Imaging Data Sharing for Safer and Fairer AI
Principal Investigator:

Pranav Rajpurkar, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School 

Category:
Manuscript
August 19, 2024

Quantized Multi-Task Learning for Context-Specific Representations of Gene Network Dynamics

bioRxiv
Green circular redirect arrow icon pointing to the right
Associated Project:
Biswas Center for Transformative Computational Cancer Biology
Principal Investigator:

Katherine Pollard, PhD, Director of Data Science & Biotechnology, Gladstone Institutes

Category:
Manuscript
August 7, 2024

A Foundation Model for Clinician-Centered Drug Repurposing

Nature Medicine
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Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School 

Category:
Manuscript
July 27, 2024

Deep-learning prediction of gene expression from personal genomes

bioRxiv
Green circular redirect arrow icon pointing to the right
Associated Project:
Biswas Center for Transformative Computational Cancer Biology
Principal Investigator:

Katherine Pollard, PhD, Director of Data Science & Biotechnology, Gladstone Institutes 

Category:
Manuscript
July 22, 2024

Contextual AI Models for Single-Cell Protein Biology

Nature
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Associated Project:
AI for Cancer Genomic Medicine: Circuitry, Treatment, Personalization
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School 

Category:
Manuscript

ReXGradient-160K: A Large-Scale Publicly Available Dataset of Chest Radiographs with Free-text Reports

Hugging Face
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Associated Project:
The MAIDA Initiative: Democratizing Global Medical Imaging Data Sharing for Safer and Fairer AI
Principal Investigator:

Pranav Rajpurkar, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Software
Associated Project:
The MAIDA Initiative: Democratizing Global Medical Imaging Data Sharing for Safer and Fairer AI
Principal Investigator:

Pranav Rajpurkar, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Software

TxAgent

GitHub
Green circular redirect arrow icon pointing to the right
Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Software

KGARevion

GitHub
Green circular redirect arrow icon pointing to the right
Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School

Category:
Software

PINNACLE

GitHub
Green circular redirect arrow icon pointing to the right
Associated Project:
CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing
Principal Investigator:

Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics, Harvard Medical School 

Category:
Software
Associated Project:
AI for Cancer Genomic Medicine: Circuitry, Treatment, Personalization
Principal Investigator:

Manolis Kellis, PhD, Professor of Computer Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Category:
Software

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