Ritu Raman of MIT and Ryan Flynn of Boston Children’s Hospital approach human biology with very different sets of tools, but a co-scientist brings their labs together. Raman, a mechanical engineer, builds living nerve and muscle tissue to model diseases that affect voluntary movement. Her husband Flynn, a chemical biologist, maps RNA on the surface of cells to see how it affects cell communication and how pathogens invade.
When Raman decided to research ALS, which was outside her usual domain, she was exposed to a extensive, conflicting literature that usually took months to understand. The co-scientist compressed this work, quickly helping Raman interrogate the evidence against her tissue model, transform ideas into testable hypotheses, and rank potential directions according to the trade-offs the labs face, such as feasibility and potential risk-reward.
But the co-scientist’s best leads had a catch: they concerned what was happening on the surface of cells, where much of their communication was mediated. Raman could manipulate tissues and measure results, but decoding the molecular interactions responsible for these signals was beyond her area of expertise.
This gap became a catalyst for collaboration. Raman introduced Flynn to modern research directions, and the pair used the Co-Scientist program repeatedly, combining his best ideas into imaginative research paths that connected their different toolkits. To develop modern therapies, the search is currently underway for modern RNA-based mechanisms – and potentially RNA-based drugs – that could be used to combat ALS.