MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative, launched in 2015, treats Alzheimer’s and related neurodegenerative diseases as system‑wide failures that require interdisciplinary solutions. The September 25 symposium “Innovations for the Aging Brain” featured six talks that illustrated MIT’s current approaches.
Giovanni Traverso and collaborators built an AI system called FINGERS‑7B that merges clinical‑trial results, lifestyle histories, and multi‑omics data. By training on 8 trillion tokens, the model predicts an individual’s Alzheimer’s trajectory and recommends personalized prevention interventions, while also informing trial‑design by pinpointing optimal patient cohorts.
Earl K. Miller and Emery N. Brown presented a closed‑loop anesthesia platform that reads brain‑wave phase‑desynchronization signatures of unconsciousness and automatically adjusts drug dosing, aiming to reduce postoperative delirium in older surgical patients.
Associate Professor Ritu Raman described engineered muscle‑tissue constructs that incorporate nerves and vasculature. Using patient‑derived induced pluripotent stem cells, her lab models neuromuscular diseases such as ALS, enabling detailed study of neuromuscular junctions and drug screening.
Assistant Professor Oleta Johnson’s chemistry group targets intrinsically disordered proteins (e.g., amyloid‑β, α‑synuclein). Their strategy is to chemically identify early‑stage aggregation, detect conformational shifts, and intervene before toxic aggregates form.
Alan Jasanoff’s lab creates novel MRI chemical probes that render enzymes like cholinesterase and disease‑related lipids visible in scans. A genetically encoded probe further enhances functional MRI of brain activity.
Laura Kiessling, together with Ed Boyden, investigates cell‑surface glycans, especially heparan sulfate, which has been linked to Alzheimer’s. Their work shows that distinct glycan sequences organize on membranes to recruit specific proteins, offering a new toolkit for disease targeting.
The subsequent poster session featured more than a dozen projects, ranging from massive AI datasets to single‑cell sugar chemistry, underscoring MIT’s breadth of research on the aging brain.
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