Scientists and engineers from across MIT described their latest work to improve aging brain health at a symposium held on September 25, showcasing innovations spanning artificial intelligence, molecular imaging and bioengineered disease models. The event, “Innovations for the Aging Brain”, was organised by MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative and detailed this week by MIT News, highlighting how engineering, chemistry and neuroscience are converging to tackle Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS.
“The ABI is unique because it brings together researchers from a diverse array of fields,” said ABI director Li-Huei Tsai, Picower Professor in the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. “Today’s symposium showcases MIT’s collective brilliance across neuroscience, engineering, chemistry, and beyond.” The six talks at the Singleton Auditorium illustrated what the initiative’s founding premise — that neurodegenerative diseases are complex, “system-wide” breakdowns requiring advances of many kinds — has come to mean at MIT.
How AI Is Changing Aging Brain Health
One of the headline talks featured a team effort including Giovanni Traverso, the Karl Van Tassel Professor of Mechanical Engineering and a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who has joined forces with Tsai and collaborators to develop an artificial intelligence system that could improve personalised Alzheimer’s care by matching patients to the best prevention interventions for them.
The system integrates data from clinical trials, patient lifestyle histories and multi-omics data such as genomics and proteomics to predict an individual’s Alzheimer’s progression and likely response to interventions. Speaking alongside project leads Arvid Gollwitzer of the Broad Institute and MIT-Novo Nordisk AI Fellow Adrián Noriega de la Colina, Traverso described how the team engineered an AI model called FINGERS-7B, trained on 8 trillion “tokens” drawn from these diverse data sources to inform its predictions about disease progression and intervention response.
Aging Brain Health Chemistry Breakthroughs
Other talks drilled down to the molecular level. Alan Jasanoff of the McGovern Institute presented molecular MRI probes for studying ageing, offering new ways to illuminate neural circuit activity. Laura Kiessling of MIT Chemistry described her lab’s work probing glycans in the brain — sugar chains that organise on cell membranes and recruit specific proteins — carried out with ABI founding member Ed Boyden. Her team has developed a toolkit to study these structures across diseases, potentially giving scientists a means to target different cells and cellular processes.
Oleta Johnson, also of MIT Chemistry, spoke on the timing of chemical intervention in protein aggregation, the process by which proteins clump together in neurodegenerative diseases. Meanwhile, Ritu Raman of MIT Mechanical Engineering presented bioengineered models of the neuro-muscular junction to study ALS, and Earl Miller of the Picower Institute examined how anaesthesia makes us unconscious — and why that matters for the ageing brain, including anaesthesia safety for older adults.
Aging Brain Health: What’s Next
Following the six talks, more than a dozen trainees presented aging brain-related projects at a poster session, further demonstrating the breadth of research the initiative exists to encourage. From massive AI datasets to the sugars on individual cells, the symposium highlighted how MIT scientists are pushing the frontiers of science and engineering to improve understanding of, and interventions for, the health of the ageing brain.
No timeline for clinical translation was disclosed, but the message from Cambridge was clear: tackling age-related neurodegeneration will require many kinds of advances from many sources — and the Aging Brain Initiative intends to keep convening them under one roof.
Inside the Symposium Programme
The half-day programme, held in person at the Singleton Auditorium on MIT’s Cambridge campus and hosted by faculty host Li-Huei Tsai, ran from 1:00 to 6:00 pm with a poster session and reception to close. The six talks carried titles that map the breadth of the field: Alan Jasanoff on “Molecular MRI Probes for Studying Aging”, Laura Kiessling on “Probing Glycans in the Brain”, Oleta Johnson on “Timing Is Everything: Chemical Intervention in Protein Aggregation”, Traverso’s team on “Engineering Precision-Prevention: FINGERPRINT — From Multiomics to Foundation Models and the Biology of Intervention Response”, Ritu Raman on “Engineering Functional Neuromuscular Tissues for Disease Modeling and Therapeutic Discovery”, and Earl Miller on “How Anesthesia Makes You Unconscious and Why That Matters to an Aging Brain”.
From its beginning in 2015, the premise of MIT’s Aging Brain Initiative has been that neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s are complex “system-wide” breakdowns that will require advances of many kinds from many sources to address. Eleven years on, the September 25 symposium showed what that premise looks like in practice — molecular imaging platforms that illuminate neural circuit activity, brain-wave dynamics underlying cognition and memory, chemical tools for precisely targeting ageing-associated molecular pathways, and the first AI foundation model built to make Alzheimer’s preventable.