Uniting biological toolkits for a new approach to ALS

Ritu Raman, a mechanical engineer at MIT, builds living nerve and muscle tissues to model movement diseases. Her husband Ryan Flynn at Boston Children's Hospital maps RNA on cell surfaces to study communication and pathogen invasion. When Raman began investigating ALS, which was outside her usual domain, she faced a vast and contradictory literature that would take months to understand. Using Google DeepMind's Co-Scientist, she compressed that work, interrogated evidence related to her tissue model, turned ideas into testable hypotheses, and ranked directions based on feasibility and risk-reward. The best leads involved cell surface mechanisms, where much cellular communication is mediated, but decoding those molecular interactions was outside Raman's expertise. She brought her findings to Flynn, and together they used Co-Scientist iteratively, combining ideas into creative research pathways uniting their distinct toolkits. They are now hunting for novel RNA-based mechanisms and drugs to target ALS.