Integrating Biology 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 focusing on a task involving lab equipment, with a tube rack and other supplies visible on the shelf behind her.

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

When Raman decided to take on ALS research, it was outside her usual scope. She had to work through a large body of complex, often contradictory literature, which could take months to fully understand. Co-Scientist compressed that work, helping Raman quickly connect the evidence to her tissue models. It also turned ideas into testable hypotheses and ranked promising directions based on the trade-offs labs actually face, such as feasibility and the potential risk-reward balance.

But the most valuable clues Co-Scientist surfaced came with a caveat: they were about what is happening on the cell surface, where much of cell-to-cell communication is mediated. Raman can manipulate tissues and measure outcomes, but unraveling the molecular interactions driving these signals was outside her expertise.

That gap became the basis for collaboration. Raman brought the new research direction to Flynn, and the two iteratively used Co-Scientist to combine its best ideas into a more creative research path. By bringing their different toolkits together, they are exploring new RNA-based mechanisms — and potentially RNA-based drugs — to target ALS and support the development of new therapies.

Slide 1/2

Science is a team sport. Co-Scientist can’t do science alone, and I can’t do it alone. It helps me organize my thoughts and clarify what I should ask other experts and collaborators.

Associate Professor Ritu Raman

MIT

We break down the top concepts from Co-Scientist and build something new from there. It finds ideas that are sound and sensible, then nudges them in a slightly different direction to lead to more creative outcomes.

Associate Professor Ryan Flynn

Boston Children’s Hospital