$15 million in funding for research at the Intersection of AI and health from Sanjit Biswas, in partnership with the Milken Institute Science Philanthropy Accelerator for Research and Collaboration

Five research teams were selected to receive funding in the first cycle of the Biswas Family Foundation’s Transformative Computational Biology Grant Program.

$15 million of funding was awarded to research using computational tools across a range of focus areas, including AI for genomic medicine, diagnosis of cardiovascular disease, precision oncology therapies, enhancement of clinical datasets, and drug repurposing systems.

Five multidisciplinary research teams will receive nearly $15 million total in grant funding for projects aiming to drive translational impact and the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) models in clinical settings for diagnosis and treatment. The awarded institutes and lead investigators are detailed below.

AI for Genomic Medicine: Circuitry, Treatment, Personalization (Massachusetts Institute of Technology): Manolis Kellis, PhD, Professor of Computer Science

A Chatbot Assistant for Genetic Diagnosis and Interpretation of Common and Rare Cardiovascular Diseases (Stanford University): Anshul Kundaje, PhD, Associate Professor of Genetics and Computer Science

Biswas Center for Transformative Computational Cancer Biology (Gladstone Institutes): Katherine Pollard, PhD, Director of Data Science & Biotechnology

The MAIDA Initiative: Democratizing Global Medical Imaging Data Sharing for Safer and Fairer AI (Harvard Medical School): Pranav Rajpurkar, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics

CURE-Bench: Universal Benchmark for All-Disease Drug Repurposing (Harvard Medical School): Marinka Zitnik, PhD, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Informatics

Computational tools have the potential to revolutionize how to study, prevent, and treat human disease. Additional support to enhance AI and computational biology research, inclusive of a gift to the Arc Institute, marks a total of $15 million in giving for the Biswas Family Foundation for this interdisciplinary field, and the beginning of more support.

“Today’s rapid advances in AI and computation are leading to a new era of scientific discovery. It is now possible to bring together data from millions of patients, identify new mechanisms of disease, and turn those insights into translational impact,” said Sanjit Biswas, co-founder of the Biswas Family Foundation and CEO of Samsara. “We hope this initial investment will support groundbreaking research that will lead to a significant improvement in human health.”

The announcement of the grant program awardees comes alongside the release of the Milken Institute SPARC’s Computational Biology: A Giving Smarter Guide.

This guide examines the landscape of the computational biology field and offers a review of how philanthropic investments are uniquely positioned to support gaps in the field to advance the deployment of AI tools to patients. This guide examines the landscape of the computational biology field and offers a review of how philanthropic investments are uniquely positioned to support gaps in the field to advance the Transformative deployment of AI tools to patients.

“The Milken Institute’s analysis has made clear that philanthropic funding can address a variety of challenges to accelerate the implementation of computational models in clinical settings to improve patient care,” said Cara Altimus, PhD, managing director, Milken Institute SPARC. “The Biswas Family Foundation’s launch of this grant program will help fill this gap. Additional investments across the biomedical and health ecosystems are needed to ensure the promise of AI tools to help people live longer, healthier lives is fully realized.”

Milken Institute SPARC works with philanthropists to develop comprehensive strategies and launch and lead high-impact science and health-oriented research initiatives.

The Biswas Family Foundation is a grant-making private foundation that helps fund teams of leading scientists at several research institutions. We hope to accelerate both the understanding of complex diseases and translational research in practice and help improve the lives of millions of people around the world.

The Milken Institute is a nonprofit, nonpartisan think tank focused on accelerating measurable progress toward a meaningful life. Focusing on financial, physical, mental, and environmental health, we bring together the best ideas and innovative resourcing to develop blueprints for tackling some of our most critical global issues through the lens of what’s pressing now and what’s coming next.

Sanjit Biswas is a successful American Internet entrepreneur and computer scientist. He is also a co-founder of Samsara, an Internet of Things company headquartered in San Francisco, California, that provides hardware and software for physical operations.

He also co-founded and served as CEO of Meraki, Inc. (now Cisco Meraki), a cloud-managed networking company now part of Cisco Systems.

Biswas has a bachelor’s degree from Stanford and a master’s degree from MIT.

In 2007, he was named to the MIT Technology Review TR35 as one of the top 35 innovators in the world under the age of 35