Predicting clinical outcomes from preclinical data is essential for identifying safe and effective drug combinations. Current models rely on structural or target-based features to identify high-efficacy, low-toxicity drug combinations. However, these approaches fail to incorporate the multimodal data necessary for accurate, clinically-relevant predictions. Here, we introduce MADRIGAL, a multimodal AI model that learns from structural, pathway, cell viability, and transcriptomic data to predict drug combination effects across 953 clinical outcomes and 21842 compounds, including combinations of approved drugs and novel compounds in development. MADRIGAL uses a transformer bottleneck module to unify preclinical drug data modalities while handling missing data during training and inference--a major challenge in multimodal learning. It outperforms single-modality methods and state-of-the-art models in predicting adverse drug interactions. MADRIGAL performs virtual screening of anticancer drug combinations and supports polypharmacy management for type II diabetes and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH). It identifies transporter-mediated drug interactions. MADRIGAL predicts resmetirom, the first and only FDA-approved drug for MASH, among therapies with the most favorable safety profile. It supports personalized cancer therapy by integrating genomic profiles from cancer patients. Using primary acute myeloid leukemia samples and patient-derived xenograft models, it predicts the efficacy of personalized drug combinations. Integrating MADRIGAL with a large language model allows users to describe clinical outcomes in natural language, improving safety assessment by identifying potential adverse interactions and toxicity risks. MADRIGAL provides a multimodal approach for designing combination therapies with improved predictive accuracy and clinical relevance.

Fox News contributor Dr. Marc Siegel joins'Fox News Live' to discuss the FDA approving a new Alzheimer treatment drug and the FDA banning bromide vegetable oils. "Normal" levels of vitamin B12 may not be enough to ward off dementia, new research finds. Researchers at University of California San Francisco studied 231 healthy older adults (averaging 71 years of age) who did not have dementia or mild cognitive impairment. Blood tests showed that their B12 levels averaged 414.8 pmol/L, while the recommended minimum level in the U.S. is just 148 pmol/L. Participants who had lower B12 levels were found to have "slower cognitive and visual processing speeds" when taking tests, which is linked to "subtle cognitive decline," according to a UCSF press release.

Whether and how to regulate AI is one of the defining questions of our times - a question that is being debated locally, nationally, and internationally. We argue that much of this debate is proceeding on a false premise. Specifically, our article challenges the prevailing academic consensus that the European Union's AI regulatory framework is fundamentally rights-driven and the correlative presumption that other rights-regarding nations should therefore follow Europe's lead in AI regulation. Rather than taking rights language in EU rules and regulations at face value, we show how EU AI regulation is the logical outgrowth of a particular cultural, political, and historical context. We show that although instruments like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the AI Act invoke the language of fundamental rights, these rights are instrumentalized - used as rhetorical cover for governance tools that address systemic risks and maintain institutional stability. As such, we reject claims that the EU's regulatory framework and the substance of its rules should be adopted as universal imperatives and transplanted to other liberal democracies. To add weight to our argument from historical context, we conduct a comparative analysis of AI regulation in five contested domains: data privacy, cybersecurity, healthcare, labor, and misinformation. This EU-US comparison shows that the EU's regulatory architecture is not meaningfully rights-based. Our article's key intervention in AI policy debates is not to suggest that the current American regulatory model is necessarily preferable but that the presumed legitimacy of the EU's AI regulatory approach must be abandoned.

Scientific discovery relies on scientists generating novel hypotheses that undergo rigorous experimental validation. To augment this process, we introduce an AI co-scientist, a multi-agent system built on Gemini 2.0. The AI co-scientist is intended to help uncover new, original knowledge and to formulate demonstrably novel research hypotheses and proposals, building upon prior evidence and aligned to scientist-provided research objectives and guidance. The system's design incorporates a generate, debate, and evolve approach to hypothesis generation, inspired by the scientific method and accelerated by scaling test-time compute. Key contributions include: (1) a multi-agent architecture with an asynchronous task execution framework for flexible compute scaling; (2) a tournament evolution process for self-improving hypotheses generation. Automated evaluations show continued benefits of test-time compute, improving hypothesis quality. While general purpose, we focus development and validation in three biomedical areas: drug repurposing, novel target discovery, and explaining mechanisms of bacterial evolution and anti-microbial resistance. For drug repurposing, the system proposes candidates with promising validation findings, including candidates for acute myeloid leukemia that show tumor inhibition in vitro at clinically applicable concentrations. For novel target discovery, the AI co-scientist proposed new epigenetic targets for liver fibrosis, validated by anti-fibrotic activity and liver cell regeneration in human hepatic organoids. Finally, the AI co-scientist recapitulated unpublished experimental results via a parallel in silico discovery of a novel gene transfer mechanism in bacterial evolution. These results, detailed in separate, co-timed reports, demonstrate the potential to augment biomedical and scientific discovery and usher an era of AI empowered scientists.

Foundation Models that are capable of processing and generating multi-modal data have transformed AI's role in medicine. However, a key limitation of their reliability is hallucination, where inaccurate or fabricated information can impact clinical decisions and patient safety. We define medical hallucination as any instance in which a model generates misleading medical content. This paper examines the unique characteristics, causes, and implications of medical hallucinations, with a particular focus on how these errors manifest themselves in real-world clinical scenarios. Our contributions include (1) a taxonomy for understanding and addressing medical hallucinations, (2) benchmarking models using medical hallucination dataset and physician-annotated LLM responses to real medical cases, providing direct insight into the clinical impact of hallucinations, and (3) a multi-national clinician survey on their experiences with medical hallucinations. Our results reveal that inference techniques such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Search Augmented Generation can effectively reduce hallucination rates. However, despite these improvements, non-trivial levels of hallucination persist. These findings underscore the ethical and practical imperative for robust detection and mitigation strategies, establishing a foundation for regulatory policies that prioritize patient safety and maintain clinical integrity as AI becomes more integrated into healthcare. The feedback from clinicians highlights the urgent need for not only technical advances but also for clearer ethical and regulatory guidelines to ensure patient safety. A repository organizing the paper resources, summaries, and additional information is available at https://github.com/mitmedialab/medical hallucination.

In recent years, machine learning has profoundly reshaped the field of chemistry, facilitating significant advancements across various applications, including the prediction of molecular properties and the generation of molecular structures. Language models and graph-based models are extensively utilized within this domain, consistently achieving state-of-the-art results across an array of tasks. However, the prevailing practice of representing chemical compounds in the SMILES format -- used by most datasets and many language models -- presents notable limitations as a training data format. In contrast, chemical fingerprints offer a more physically informed representation of compounds, thereby enhancing their suitability for model training. This study aims to develop a language model that is specifically trained on fingerprints. Furthermore, we introduce a bimodal architecture that integrates this language model with a graph model. Our proposed methodology synthesizes these approaches, utilizing RoBERTa as the language model and employing Graph Isomorphism Networks (GIN), Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN) and Graphormer as graph models. This integration results in a significant improvement in predictive performance compared to conventional strategies for tasks such as Quantitative Structure-Activity Relationship (QSAR) and the prediction of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra, among others.

Lung cancer is the second most common cancer and the leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide. Survival largely depends on tumor stage at diagnosis, and early detection with low-dose CT can significantly reduce mortality in high-risk patients. AI can improve the detection, measurement, and characterization of pulmonary nodules while reducing assessment time. However, the training data, functionality, and performance of available AI systems vary considerably, complicating software selection and regulatory evaluation. Manufacturers must specify intended use and provide test statistics, but they can choose their training and test data, limiting standardization and comparability. Under the EU AI Act, consistent quality assurance is required for AI-based nodule detection, measurement, and characterization. This position paper proposes systematic quality assurance grounded in a validated reference dataset, including real screening cases plus phantom data to verify volume and growth rate measurements. Regular updates shall reflect demographic shifts and technological advances, ensuring ongoing relevance. Consequently, ongoing AI quality assurance is vital. Regulatory challenges are also adressed. While the MDR and the EU AI Act set baseline requirements, they do not adequately address self-learning algorithms or their updates. A standardized, transparent quality assessment - based on sensitivity, specificity, and volumetric accuracy - enables an objective evaluation of each AI solution's strengths and weaknesses. Establishing clear testing criteria and systematically using updated reference data lay the groundwork for comparable performance metrics, informing tenders, guidelines, and recommendations.

With an eerie, robot-like appearance and an otherworldly glow when worn, those LED masks all over your FYP give off a science-fiction vibe. Fittingly, it was researchers with NASA who discovered the potential for medical light therapy to treat wounds, arthritis, glaucoma and other ailments in the 1990s. By the early 2000s, that LED light therapy was growing in popularity at dermatology offices where patients donned an LED mask or used similar devices to slow aging and treat acne. And now that technology has trickled down to our homes. Brands like Omnilux and Dr. Gross have popularized direct-to-consumer LED masks that are safe to use regularly in the privacy of your own home, available at a range of price points (from under 100 to nearly 500).

Drug discovery remains a slow and expensive process that involves many steps, from detecting the target structure to obtaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), and is often riddled with safety concerns. Accurate prediction of how drugs interact with their targets and the development of new drugs by using better methods and technologies have immense potential to speed up this process, ultimately leading to faster delivery of life-saving medications. Traditional methods used for drug-target interaction prediction show limitations, particularly in capturing complex relationships between drugs and their targets. As an outcome, deep learning models have been presented to overcome the challenges of interaction prediction through their precise and efficient end results. By outlining promising research avenues and models, each with a different solution but similar to the problem, this paper aims to give researchers a better idea of methods for even more accurate and efficient prediction of drug-target interaction, ultimately accelerating the development of more effective drugs. A total of 180 prediction methods for drug-target interactions were analyzed throughout the period spanning 2016 to 2025 using different frameworks based on machine learning, mainly deep learning and graph neural networks. Additionally, this paper discusses the novelty, architecture, and input representation of these models.

In this work-in-progress, we investigate the certification of AI systems, focusing on the practical application and limitations of existing certification catalogues in the light of the AI Act by attempting to certify a publicly available AI system. We aim to evaluate how well current approaches work to effectively certify an AI system, and how publicly accessible AI systems, that might not be actively maintained or initially intended for certification, can be selected and used for a sample certification process. Our methodology involves leveraging the Fraunhofer AI Assessment Catalogue as a comprehensive tool to systematically assess an AI model's compliance with certification standards. We find that while the catalogue effectively structures the evaluation process, it can also be cumbersome and time-consuming to use. We observe the limitations of an AI system that has no active development team anymore and highlighted the importance of complete system documentation. Finally, we identify some limitations of the certification catalogues used and proposed ideas on how to streamline the certification process.