USC wins AI health funding
USC received funding to build an AI tool aimed at advancing treatment for rare pediatric diseases — a clear signal that campus research remains a source of portfolio‑worthy, socially impactful projects. The grant is a practical anchor for students wanting to prototype healthcare AI with real institutional backing. (keck.usc.edu)
Keck School of Medicine researchers won an ARPA‑H award of up to $6.8 million for a two‑year UNIfying Cell Therapy Outcome prediction and Regulatory Navigation (UNICORN) project, with Mohamed Abou‑el‑Enein named principal investigator. (arpa-h.gov) UNICORN’s stated deliverable is a regulatory decision‑support framework that interprets product‑related evidence for cell and gene therapies when conventional clinical trial data are limited, specifically targeting pediatric indications. (eurekalert.org) Technical approach combines an advanced cell‑analysis platform developed in Abou‑el‑Enein’s lab (previously used to study and optimize CAR‑T cells) with machine‑learning pipelines trained on single‑cell and multi‑omic measurements to link therapy product features to patient outcomes. (eurekalert.org) The award is administered through ARPA‑H’s UNICORN program materials and lists ARPA‑H program manager Daria Fedyukina as project lead contact, while the work is embedded in the USC/CHLA Cell Therapy Program and intends to leverage USC/CHLA cGMP capabilities. (arpa-h.gov) ARPA‑H documentation for the project highlights a potential impact on approximately 600 rare pediatric diseases, including ultra‑rare disorders where hematopoietic stem‑cell correction could be curative. (arpa-h.gov) Concrete portfolio directions aligned with UNICORN include: implementing an explainable multi‑task model for small‑N single‑cell datasets (UNICORN research precedents exist), building synthetic‑data augmentation and domain‑adaptation pipelines for CGT datasets, and prototyping a regulatory‑style visualization/reporting UI that mirrors decision‑support outputs; Keck’s AI Collaboratory and CHLA’s Innovation Studio offer institutional collaboration pathways. (researchgate.net)
