Sangeeta Bhatia, SM ’93, PhD ’97, a senior author of a paper on the work with her former student Ava Amini ’16, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, led the MIT team that came up with the idea of such particles over a decade ago. But earlier efforts used trial and error to identify peptides that would be cleaved by specific proteases, and the results could be ambiguous. With AI, peptides can be designed to meet specific criteria.

“If we know that a particular protease is really key to a certain cancer, and we can optimize the sensor to be highly sensitive and specific to that protease, then that gives us a great diagnostic signal,” Amini says. 

Bhatia’s lab is now working with ARPA-H on an at-home kit that could potentially detect 30 types of early cancer. Peptides designed using the model could also be incorporated into cancer therapeutics.