Sangeeta Bhatia, SM ’93, PhD ’97, a senior author paper Working with his former student Ava Amini ’16, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, he led the MIT team that came up with the idea of such particles a decade ago. But earlier efforts used trial and error to identify peptides that would be degraded by specific proteases, and the results could be ambiguous. With AI, peptides can be designed to meet specific criteria.
“If we know that a particular protease is really the key to a certain cancer, and we can customize the sensor to be highly sensitive and specific to that protease, that gives us a great diagnostic signal,” Amini says.
Bhatia’s lab is now working with ARPA-H on a home kit that can potentially detect up to 30 types of early cancer. Peptides designed using the model can also be incorporated into cancer therapeutics.
