Integrating Biological Toolkits to Open New Paths in ALS Research

Image 37: This image shows a young woman with long dark hair, wearing a dark long-sleeve top and black nitrile gloves, working in a laboratory. She is holding a pipette and focused on a task involving lab equipment, with a test tube rack and other supplies visible on the shelf behind her.

Ritu Raman at MIT and Ryan Flynn at Boston Children’s Hospital study human biology with very different toolkits, but Co-Scientist is bringing their labs together. Raman, a mechanical engineer, builds living nerve and muscle tissues to model diseases that affect voluntary movement. Her husband, Flynn, is a chemical biologist who maps RNA on the cell surface to study how RNA affects cell-to-cell communication and how pathogens invade cells.

When Raman decided to investigate ALS—a topic outside her usual area of study—she was confronted with a sprawling, often contradictory body of literature that would normally take months to make sense of. Co-Scientist compressed that work, quickly helping Raman connect the evidence to her tissue models, turn ideas into testable hypotheses, and rank possible directions based on the trade-offs her lab actually faces, such as feasibility and the potential risk-reward balance.

But Co-Scientist’s most valuable leads came with a caveat: they involved what happens at the cell surface, where much of the cell-to-cell communication is mediated. Raman can manipulate tissues and measure outcomes, but untangling the molecular interactions driving those signals is outside her expertise.

That gap became the catalyst for collaboration. Raman brought the new research directions to Flynn, and the two iterated with Co-Scientist, combining its best ideas into a more creative research path that united their different toolkits. To develop new therapies, they are now looking for new RNA-based mechanisms—and potentially RNA-based drugs—to target ALS.

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Science is a team sport. Co-Scientist can’t do science on its own, and neither can I. It helps me organize my thoughts and figure out what questions to ask other experts and collaborators.

Associate Professor Ritu Raman

MIT

You take apart Co-Scientist’s top-ranked concepts and then synthesize them into something new. It can help you capture ideas that are sensible and logically sound, tweak them from a few different angles, and turn them into something more creative.

Associate Professor Ryan Flynn

Boston Children’s Hospital