Mount Sinai team wins million dollar prize for the development of Biomni-AD

A team led by Dr. Kuan-lin Huang, PhD, has been named a winner of the $1 million Alzheimer's Insights AI Prize, the Alzheimer's Disease Data Initiative (AD Data Initiative) announced on March 20. Dr. Huang is an Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

The award honors the development of Biomni-AD, an advanced AI-powered "co-scientist" designed to dramatically reduce the time required to generate scientific insights from complex biomedical data.

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 recognize two winning teams, doubling the total prize amount to $2 million-reflecting both the exceptional quality of submissions and the urgency of advancing new approaches to Alzheimer's disease and related dementias.

Receiving this prize validates that AI can contribute to Alzheimer's research right now, not someday. 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."

Dr. Kuan-lin Huang, PhD, Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences, Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai

Alzheimer's disease is projected 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 designed to address this bottleneck.

Key capabilities and innovations of Biomni-AD include:

• Dramatically accelerated research workflows: Tasks that traditionally take months of manual data wrangling can be completed in minutes, freeing scientists to focus on generating and testing hypotheses.
• Natural language interface: Researchers can pose complex scientific questions in plain English and receive a fully developed, executable analysis plan.
• End-to-end reproducibility: The system generates complete research outputs, including code, figures, and reports, with full transparency and auditability.
• Multimodal data integration: Biomni-AD connects genetics, single-cell data, CRISPR screens, proteomics, biomarkers, and clinical datasets within a single workflow.
• AI with human oversight: The platform is designed as a "co-scientist," not a replacement. Researchers review and approve the agent's research plan before execution and can inspect each step of the analytical process.
• Open and accessible infrastructure: Built on a curated Alzheimer's data lake and more than 180 specialized tools, Biomni-AD is designed to be broadly usable across the research community.

In early testing, the platform has already identified robust biological signals and helped prioritize promising drug targets with greater speed and confidence than conventional approaches, according to the investigators.

"Mount Sinai has been a leader in Alzheimer's genomics and data-driven discovery for decades. Biomni-AD builds on the intersection of these approaches and expertise," says Alison Goate, DPhil, Director of The Ronald M. Loeb Center for Alzheimer's Disease and Chair of the Department of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine. "Biomni-AD represents a meaningful advance in how science can be conducted, enabling scientists to ask more ambitious questions and pursue discoveries that were previously out of reach."

The winning solution will be made freely available to researchers worldwide through the AD Data Initiative's AD Workbench platform, helping to democratize access to advanced analytics and accelerate progress across institutions.

"Every month saved in the research pipeline matters for patients and families. If Biomni-AD can help move even one promising lead to clinical testing faster, that is meaningful," says Dr. Huang

The team emphasized that this work extends beyond a single platform to a broader ecosystem. Building on the Biomni open-source community, they plan to launch a new ADA Consortium to expand collaboration. Earlier this year, the Biomni-AD Discovery Prize engaged researchers in tackling real Alzheimer's questions using the AI agent, reflecting a shared goal of enabling the field to move faster together.

Looking ahead, the Mount Sinai team plans to focus on deploying Biomni-AD globally and launching collaborative "call-for-hypothesis" initiatives. These efforts are expected to enable researchers to generate and prioritize data-driven hypotheses, with the most promising candidates advancing to experimental validation at Mount Sinai.

"No single lab is going to solve Alzheimer's alone," says Dr. Huang. "What we're building is a shared infrastructure-a way for thousands of researchers to work with a powerful AI as a partner, test more ideas, and reach answers faster. That's how we find the next breakthrough."