Catherine Graham Johns Hopkins University biomedical engineer Jean Fan and her team develop—and freely share—computational tools that give researchers everywhere the ability to discover breakthrough cancer drugs, gene therapies, and diagnostic tests for neurodegenerative diseases. But sweeping federal cuts to research grants are now threatening the training of the next generation of scientists who make this kind of work possible.
Fan’s JEFworks lab, which is entirely supported by the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health, creates computational tools as open-source software that uses artificial intelligence to analyze which genes are active in specific cells and pinpoint their exact location within tissue samples—essentially creating a detailed molecular AI portrait for every cell. This capability allows scientists to better understand diseases from acute kidney injury to brain cancers at an unprecedented molecular level.
The impact of this work extends beyond academia. Software pioneered at institutions like Johns Hopkins is frequently adopted by leading companies for their own research and development pipelines.
“Companies often take the free, open-source software developed in university labs and use it to build their own commercial products, creating tremendous economic value downstream,” said Fan, an associate professor of biomedical engineering at the university’s Whiting School of Engineering and School of Medicine. “Our objective is for the broader scientific community to freely apply our tools to their own biological research questions, helping form the infrastructure of modern biotechnology and pharmaceutical development.”
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