A team led by Dr. Kuan-lin Huang has been selected as the recipient of the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative’s $1 million Alzheimer’s Insight AI Award, announced on March 20. Dr. Huang is an associate professor of genetics and genomic sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
The award recognizes the development of Biomni-AD, an advanced AI-powered “collaborative scientist” designed to significantly reduce the time needed to generate scientific insights from complex biomedical data.
The Mount Sinai team worked with partners at Stanford University on the winning project. Originally conceived as a single $1 million prize, the contest was expanded to recognize two winning teams, doubling the total prize pool to $2 million. This reflects both the exceptional quality of the submissions and the urgency to advance new approaches to Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias.
Winning this award proves that AI can contribute to Alzheimer’s disease research now, not just someday. This gives us the resources and visibility to broadly deploy Biomni-AD, enabling researchers around the world to gain insights from their data in minutes instead of months. That’s what we’ve been working toward. ”
Quanlin Huang, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai
Alzheimer’s disease is predicted to affect more than 150 million people worldwide by 2050. Vast datasets currently exist across genomics, imaging, proteomics, and clinical research, but much of this information remains fragmented and difficult to integrate. Biomni-AD was designed to address this bottleneck.
Key features and innovations of Biomni-AD include:
- Dramatically accelerate your research workflow: Tasks that traditionally took months to manually organize data can now be completed in minutes, freeing scientists to focus on generating and testing hypotheses.
- Natural language interface: Researchers can ask complex scientific questions in plain English and receive fully developed and executable analysis plans.
- End-to-end reproducibility: The system generates complete research outputs, including codes, diagrams, and reports, with full transparency and auditability.
- Multimodal data integration: Biomni-AD connects genetics, single-cell data, CRISPR screening, proteomics, biomarkers, and clinical datasets within a single workflow.
- AI under human supervision: The platform is designed as a “co-scientist” rather than a replacement. Researchers can review and approve agent research plans and inspect each step of the analysis process before execution.
- Open and accessible infrastructure: Biomni-AD is built on a curated Alzheimer’s disease data lake and over 180 specialized tools, and is designed for widespread use across the research community.
In early tests, the platform has already identified robust biological signals and is helping prioritize promising drug targets more quickly and reliably than traditional approaches, researchers say.
“Mount Sinai has been a leader in genomics and data-driven discovery in Alzheimer’s disease for decades. Biomni-AD is built on the intersection of these approaches and expertise,” said Alison Gault, DPhil, director of the Ronald M. Loeb Alzheimer’s Disease Center and chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine. “Biomni-AD represents a meaningful advancement in the way science is conducted, allowing scientists to ask more ambitious questions and pursue discoveries that were previously out of reach.”
The winning solutions will be made available free of charge to researchers around the world through the AD Data Initiative’s AD Workbench platform, helping to democratize access to advanced analytics and accelerate progress across institutions.
“Monthly savings in the research pipeline is important to patients and families, and if Biomni-AD can help move even one promising lead quickly into clinical trials, it makes sense,” says Dr. Huang.
The team emphasized that this effort extends beyond a single platform to a broader ecosystem. Building on the Biomni open source community, we are launching a new ADA consortium to expand collaboration. Earlier this year, the Biomni-AD Discovery Prize joined researchers in using AI agents to tackle real-world Alzheimer’s disease problems, reflecting a shared goal of enabling the field to work together to move forward faster.
Looking ahead, the Mount Sinai team plans to focus on rolling out Biomni-AD globally and launching collaborative “what-if” efforts. It is hoped that these efforts will allow researchers to generate and prioritize data-driven hypotheses, with the most promising candidates advancing to experimental testing at Mount Sinai.
“No single lab can solve Alzheimer’s disease alone,” says Dr. Huang. “What we’re building is a shared infrastructure. It’s a way for thousands of researchers to use powerful AI as a partner to test more ideas and get to answers faster. That’s how we find the next breakthrough.”
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Mount Sinai Health System
