Uniting biological toolkits for a new approach to ALS

Ritu Raman at MIT and Ryan Flynn at Boston Children's Hospital approach human biology with very different toolkits, but Co-Scientist is bridging their labs. Raman, a mechanical engineer, builds living nerve and muscle tissues to model diseases that affect voluntary movement. Her husband Flynn, a chemical biologist, maps RNA on the surface of cells to see how it influences cellular communication and how pathogens invade.

When Raman decided to investigate ALS, which was outside of her usual domain, she faced a sprawling, contradictory literature that would usually take months to grasp. Co-Scientist compressed that work, quickly helping Raman interrogate the evidence in relation to her tissue model, turn ideas into testable hypotheses, and rank potential directions in accordance with the trade-offs labs actually face, such as feasibility and potential risk–reward.

But Co-Scientist’s best leads came with a catch: they involved what happens at the surface of cells, where much of their communication is mediated. Raman could manipulate tissues and measure outcomes, but decoding the molecular interactions driving those signals was outside her area of expertise.

That gap became the catalyst for collaboration. Raman brought her new research directions to Flynn, and the pair used Co-Scientist iteratively, combining its best ideas into creative research pathways that united their distinct toolkits. To develop new therapies, their hunt is now on for novel RNA-based mechanisms—and potentially RNA-based drugs—that could be used to target ALS.