Developers of an AI-powered ‘co-scientist’ have been awarded the $1 million Alzheimer’s Insights AI Prize. 

Mount Sinai scientists, led by Dr Kuan-lin Huang, won the prize for developing Biomni-AD, an advanced AI-powered ‘co-scientist’ designed to dramatically reduce the time required to generate scientific insights from complex biomedical data. 

Biomni-AD can dramatically accelerate research workflows, generating complete research outputs, integrating multimodal data and using AI to enable scientists to review and approve research plans. The system includes a natural language interface, allowing researchers to pose Biomni-AD complex questions in English and receive a fully developed, executable analysis plan. 

The Mount Sinai team collaborated with partners at Stanford University on the winning project. Originally conceived as a single $1 million award, the competition expanded to recognise two winning teams, doubling the total prize amount to $2 million — reflecting both the quality of submissions and the urgency of advancing new approaches to Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. 

Alzheimer’s disease is predicted to affect more than 150 million people globally by 2050. While massive datasets now exist across genomics, imaging, proteomics, and clinical research, much of this information remains fragmented and difficult to integrate. Biomni-AD was subsequently designed to address this bottleneck. 

“Receiving this prize validates that AI can contribute to Alzheimer’s research right now, not someday,” said Huang.  

“It gives us the resources and visibility to deploy Biomni-AD broadly so researchers around the world can move from data to insight in minutes rather than months. That is what we have been working toward.”