Sen. McCormick tours NSF-funded AI-powered biotech labs at Penn

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U.S. Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Pa., toured a University of Pennsylvania research laboratory Friday to highlight how artificial intelligence can supercharge advances in biomedical and drug development.

“Every time I come here for a visit, I leave just inspired by all the wonderful, incredible discoveries and progress,” McCorkmick told researchers.

AIRFoundry, an AI-driven research lab funded by the National Science Foundation, is located at One uCity Square near Penn’s campus. The lab uses AI, robotics and automation to speed the development of RNA-based medicines, drug delivery systems and other biotechnology applications.

Years become weeks

Researchers at the incubator said AI is changing biomedical research by helping scientists process large datasets, predict successful drug formulations and automate parts of the discovery process.

That has meant a highly accelerated development process, bringing ideas to production in a much shorter time.

“Years of work become weeks of work, and that’s sort of the compression that you see when you use AI to do these things,” Jake Gardner, an assistant professor of computer science who works at the lab, told McCormick.

The technology has the potential to reduce the drug discovery timeline and associated costs, and may benefit fields beyond medicine, such as agriculture and veterinary science.

Right now, “a company has to search for 10 years and spend hundreds of millions to billions of dollars just looking for a potential candidate that they’ll then take through the clinical pipeline,” said Andrew Hanna, a bioengineering doctoral student working at the lab. “The goal is to turn that from like a 10-year process to like a six-month process.”

The visit also highlighted the commercialization efforts tied to Penn’s research ecosystem. Several researchers described how startup companies have emerged from university labs.

One of those, InfiniFluidics, created a prototype system that uses robotics and AI-processing to speed up the creation of RNA-based drug treatments. Co-founder Daeyeon Lee said hospitals, research labs and pharmaceutical companies could eventually use the technology.

“This is a unique project even for Penn, which is known for interdisciplinarity,” said Lee, who is also a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at Penn. “We have computer scientists that are building AI platforms so that we can design experiments for people, but then we have people working in molecular biology. We have people like me or engineers that come together to build these facilities and help researchers.”

The AI talent pipeline

Penn boasts of being the first Ivy League university to offer an undergraduate degree in AI, from which the first six students graduated this weekend.

The curriculum includes fundamental courses, as well as “AI for health” and “AI for robotics.”

George Pappas, Penn’s AI program director, told McCormick they expect the program to grow to 250 students next year.

“It’s not just advancing AI, but how to impact other disciplines and other sectors of the economy through AI,” Pappas said.