Biostate AI and Weill Cornell Medicine Collaborate to Develop AI Models for Personalized Leukemia Care

April 22, 2025 at 10:03 AM EDT

Biostate AI, a leading innovator in artificial intelligence for RNA sequencing, and Weill Cornell Medicine have entered into a strategic collaboration to develop AI for personalized assessments of patient disease prognosis and evolution. Initially, the collaboration will focus on leukemia, leveraging the Weill Cornell Leukemia Program’s vast biorepository of bone marrow and blood samples.

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Biostate AI and Weill Cornell Medicine collaborate to leverage RNA sequencing and AI modeling to improve prognosis and therapy selection for acute myeloid leukemia (AML) patients.

Under the agreement, Biostate AI will leverage its proprietary barcode-integrated reverse transcription (BIRT) technology for RNA sequencing (RNAseq) to analyze RNA expression from patient samples at scale. These results will be used to pre-train and fine-tune a transformer-based AI model, using RNA expression as its "language." Together, Biostate AI and Weill Cornell Medicine will look to prototype and then validate an AI model that will be able to perform acute myeloid leukemia (AML) subtype stratification, disease prognosis, and therapy selection.

“Current personalized medicine approaches look only at one or a few key biomarkers for each disease,” said David Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Biostate AI, and former Associate Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University. “This results in poor predictive accuracy because every patient is different, and we are not looking at the whole picture of a patient's health or disease. We aim to revolutionize patient treatment via precise AI-driven decisions on whether to prescribe treatments such as bone marrow transplants and BCL-2 inhibitors. This may ultimately lead to patients living longer and healthier lives."

Under the partnership, the Biostate AI team will initially work with Dr. Gail J. Roboz, Professor of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. In the pilot phase of the project, the teams will develop a prototype AML-specific AI model using 1000 retrospective bone marrow and blood samples. Upon reaching pre-determined technical performance milestones, the teams will expand the study to include up to 50,000 retrospective samples, including multiple longitudinal samples from the same patient, to develop definitive models.

"AML is an aggressive, biologically heterogeneous malignancy that poses both diagnostic and therapeutic challenges. My team and I look forward to investigating the potential for Biostate AI’s approach to help personalize treatment selection for AML patients,” said Dr. Roboz.

Cornell University’s Center for Technology Licensing (CTL) , facilitated the agreement, in line with the Weill Cornell Medicine’s commitment to translational research and innovation in precision medicine.

“This agreement reflects Cornell’s commitment to fostering industry partnerships that translate academic research into real-world impact,” said Dr. Lisa Placanica, Senior Managing Director of CTL at Weill Cornell, a part of Weill Cornell Medicine Enterprise Innovation, which is dedicated to nurturing innovations and industry collaborations for the academic medical institution.

Since its founding in 2023, Biostate AI has invented and patented over 12 technologies in RNAseq and AI, and has partnered with more than 100 different research groups across the United States using its BIRT technology.

“Disease prognosis represents an important new direction for Biostate AI, and unlocks applications never before possible with AI as a field,” said Ashwin Gopinath, co-founder and CTO of Biostate AI, and former Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. “Traditional RNA biomarker discovery has led to the development of standard-of-care tests like OncotypeDx for breast cancer, but this approach has failed to generalize to other diseases or even to other cancers. By taking on a modern AI plus massive data approach, we believe that Biostate AI is developing a general-purpose technology possible for improving outcomes for patients suffering from all diseases.”

About Biostate AI. Biostate AI is a startup building generative AI that predicts the evolution of human disease and drug response based on RNA sequencing data. Its patented wetlab technologies, including BIRT, allow affordable and scalable collection of massive amounts of transcriptomic and genomic data. With sites in Houston, TX, Palo Alto, CA, Bangalore, India, and Shanghai, China, Biostate AI is an international company with collaborations with top hospitals, academic researchers, and biotech/biopharma companies. Biostate AI was founded by serial entrepreneurs and former professors David Zhang (Rice U.) and Ashwin Gopinath (MIT) and is backed by top investors and experts including Accel, Dario Amodei (Anthropic), and Mike Schnall-Levin (10X Genomics).