In 1954, the world’s first successful organ transplant took place at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in the form of a kidney donated from one twin to the other. At the time, a group of doctors and scientists had correctly theorized that the recipient’s antibodies were unlikely to reject an organ from an identical twin. One Nobel Prize and a few decades later, advancements in immune-suppressing drugs increased the viability of and demand for organ transplants. Today, over 1 million organ transplants have been performed in the United States, more than any other country in the world.
Understanding how molecules interact is central to biology: from decoding how living organisms function to uncovering disease mechanisms and developing life-saving drugs. In recent years, models like AlphaFold changed our ability to predict the 3D structure of proteins, offering crucial insights into molecular shape and interaction. But while AlphaFold could show how molecules fit together, it couldn’t measure how strongly they bind — a key factor in understanding all aforementioned. That missing piece is where MIT’s new AI model, Boltz-2, comes in.
Given the recent explosion of large language models (LLMs) that can make convincingly human-like statements, it makes sense that there’s been a deepened focus on developing the models to be able to explain how they make decisions. But how can we be sure that what they’re saying is the truth?
Imagine a radiologist examining a chest X-ray from a new patient. She notices the patient has swelling in the tissue but does not have an enlarged heart. Looking to speed up diagnosis, she might use a vision-language machine-learning model to search for reports from similar patients.
The ambiguity in medical imaging can present major challenges for clinicians who are trying to identify disease. For instance, in a chest X-ray, pleural effusion, an abnormal buildup of fluid in the lungs, can look very much like pulmonary infiltrates, which are accumulations of pus or blood.
When visual information enters the brain, it travels through two pathways that process different aspects of the input. For decades, scientists have hypothesized that one of these pathways, the ventral visual stream, is responsible for recognizing objects, and that it might have been optimized by evolution to do just that.
The process of discovering molecules that have the properties needed to create new medicines and materials is cumbersome and expensive, consuming vast computational resources and months of human labor to narrow down the enormous space of potential candidates.
Think of your most prized belongings. In an increasingly virtual world, wouldn’t it be great to save a copy of that precious item and all the memories it holds?
Due to the inherent ambiguity in medical images like X-rays, radiologists often use words like “may” or “likely” when describing the presence of a certain pathology, such as pneumonia.
Six current MIT affiliates and 27 additional MIT alumni have been elected as fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
