A team led by researchers at Penn State is working to accelerate drug discovery, with the potential to treat rare diseases, by improving the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) Biomedical Data Translator (Translator) - a network of computer interfaces that take biomedical research questions and provide fact-based responses.
David Koslicki, associate professor of computer science and engineering and of biology, is leading the team, which includes a total of 24 researchers from Penn State; Oregon State University; the Institute of Systems Biology, a non-profit in Seattle; Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard; and the Université Grenoble Alpes in France. NIH's National Center for Advancing Translational Science (NCATS) recently awarded them $2.57 million for fiscal year 2025, with an anticipated total of $12.8M over five years for the project.
"Translator is a clinician- or researcher-faced tool that can currently answer questions related to rare diseases or diseases with no known treatment, but we want Translator to be able to answer any and all biomedical questions," said Koslicki, who is also affiliated with the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences at Penn State. He explained that biomedical researchers or clinicians aiming to learn more about potential treatments for a patient can ask Translator for the latest information on a particular disease, learn more about certain genes and gene activity that could be causing illness, or search for drugs that might treat related diseases.
The project aims to expand the capabilities of the system and model that obtains information to produce an output or answer to researchers' questions no matter how complex. By doing this, Koslicki's team aims to lower barriers to entry into Translator's system by improving transparency, organization and provenance of results, as well as to enhance the performance of the system for researchers.
"We want Translator to become what is akin to a question-and-answer agent similar to ChatGPT, but in contrast is actually based in fact where researchers or clinicians who input a question can trace their answers back to when the discovery was made and by whom, what research methods were used and more," said Koslicki, who also chairs the Bioinformatics and Genomics Intercollege Graduate Degree Program at Penn State.
NCATS' Cure Acceleration Network, which helps fund the new award, originally started the project in 2017, with the goal of developing a system that could aid researchers in accelerating translational research, such as discovering new relationships between drugs and treatments. Translator's purpose is to accelerate the pace at which basic science and knowledge is translated into the clinic, including for rare diseases, Koslicki said.
