The National Institutes of Health has announced the winners of a crowdsourcing competition for innovative ideas on New Approach Methodologies, or NAMs to more accurately model human biology. The Complement Animal Research In Experimentation (Complement-ARIE) Challenge Prize competition offered $1,000,000 in total prize money to diverse teams with ideas for new ways of using NAMs to conduct basic research, uncover disease mechanisms, and translate knowledge into products and practice.
The NIH Common Fund Complement-ARIE program hosted this challenge as part of the strategic planning process to refine the Complement-ARIE program concept. This program will develop, standardize, and validate the use of new approaches that will more accurately model human biology and complement, or in some cases, replace traditional research models. This challenge provided NIH with information about where innovation can be incorporated into NAMs and what types of new NAMs may benefit from further investment. Concepts from the winning entries of the Complement-ARIE Challenge Prize will be incorporated into the ongoing planning process for the Complement-ARIE program.
Twenty Complement-ARIE Challenge prize winners will share the total prize purse of $1,000,000, with each winning team receiving $50,000 for their innovative solutions. The winning solutions were selected according to the official judging criteria and demonstrated out-of-the box solutions across the competition areas of in silico, in vitro, in chemico, and combinatorial methods.
The winning solutions are listed below. Click on the solution titles and team names to learn more:
- 4D Tissue Fabrication of Human Tissue Models. Proposing new 3D printing technologies coupled with 4D tissue fabrication that actively facilitate the controlled self-organization of more functional human tissue models.
Team: 4D Tissue Fabrication - A Sensor-Enhanced Isogenic Model of Alzheimer. A personalized brain "avatar" equipped with sensors for a better understanding of Alzheimer's disease and testing of new treatments.
Team: NeuroTech Innovations Team - Agent-based Models for Adoptive Cell Therapy. An agent-based model that simulates interactions between different cell types in adoptive cell therapy in tumor treatment for continuous treatment outcome prediction.
Team: Yinyang - Cancer Immunotherapy Clinical Trials on a Chip. Developing “Pancreatic Cancer Organoids-on-a-Chip” System for personalized screening of CAR T-cell therapy.
Team: CAR-T Trials on a Chip - Click Chemistry Magic for Drug Screening. Novel chemistry NAM for high throughput drug screening, tissue engineering, and precision medicine.
Team: Delaware Click Chemistry - DevTox - Developmental Toxicity Predictor. Comprehensive approach via molecular modeling and knowledge graphs for developmental toxicity prediction to enhance maternal drug safety.
Team: Predictive, LLC - E-validation – Unleashing AI for Validation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be leveraged for several bottlenecks of the New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) validation process.
Team: Thomas Hartung's Team - Exploring Omics for Liver Toxicity Assessment. We propose using new approach methodologies of cell painting, transcriptomics, and proteomics to predict compound liver toxicity in humans.
Team: Imaging Platform, Broad - Facing the Future of Microphysiological Modeling. Advancement of a next generation microphysiological model of orofacial development to understand and prevent birth defects.
Team: Johnson Lab at Michigan State University - Future Fertility: AI-driven Human Mini-Testis Model. Establishment of an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered Human Mini-Testis Model with pathway-based high content analysis (HCA) assays for male reproductive toxicity testing.
Team: Lei Yin - Interpreting Brains and Artificial Networks. Developing a coding library to understand deep artificial neural networks, using outcomes as testable hypotheses for the visual cortex.
Team: Carlos Ramon Ponce - Machine Learning Assisted HTP Tissue Array. A novel integration of artificial intelligence with a high-throughput engineered tissue array for vascular therapy development.
Team: CO CVD - NAMKG: LLM Powered Registry to Foster NAM Adoption. Web-based NAM registry & knowledge graph for interoperability with public data assets and large language models (LLMs) to enable data discovery and tool automation.
Team: Insilica.co - Neuro-Immuno-Cutaneous Human Skin Equivalent. In vitro human skin model with epidermis, dermis, hypodermis (with neurons and macrophages) for animal-free safety testing of compounds
Team: David Kaplan's Team - Organ-on-a-Chip for Studying Osteoarthritis Pain. We will use a knee joint-on-a-chip to study the neuroimmune interactions in acute & chronic osteoarthritis pain and develop treatments.
Team: Osteoarthritis Pain Team - Organoid Intelligence (OI) - Learning in a Dish. Brain organoids show simple forms of learning, which have the potential to replace cell-level behavioral studies in non-human primates.
Team: Lena Smirnova's Team - Organoid Modeling of Rheumatoid Arthritis Joints. We will use in vitro organoids to model the diverse types of tissue inflammation that occur in joints of patients with rheumatoid arthritis
Team: Autoimmune Disease Organoids - Population Diversity in Responses to vaccination. To model vaccination and inflammatory disease, we propose multi-organ, in vitro, neuro-immune-endocrine models of diverse populations.
Team: The Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia - Pregnancy-on-Chip to Improve Reproductive Health. Interconnected fetomaternal organs, Pregnancy on Chip, has the potential to reduce animal use, increase pregnancy clinical trials & improve women’s health.
Team: Innovator Ramkumar Menon - Pulse of the Future: AI-human MEHC. Data-driven insights via an integrated pipeline of software and machine learning (ML) to analyze multi-scale engineered heart constructs (MEHC) and model human cardiovascular pathophysiology in vitro.
Team: Pulse of the Future: AI-human MEHC
Learn more about the Complement-ARIE Prize Challenge on the Complement-ARIE Challenge website.
And stay up to date on the latest Complement-ARIE program announcements by signing up for the listserv.
