Scripps Research awarded $1.7 million by NIH to advance biomedical data integration and AI-powered discovery

The grant from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) supports the ongoing development of the Biomedical Data Translator—an open-source resource to accelerate human health insights.

July 23, 2025

LA JOLLA, CA—To unlock new insights into human health and accelerate the development of life-saving therapies, Scripps Research has been awarded a $1.7 million grant from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The funding will support the institute’s continued role in the Biomedical Data Translator (Translator) program, a nationwide initiative harnessing AI and large-scale data integration to answer pressing biomedical questions.

The NCATS award is part of a multi-year funding mechanism, with the potential to total $8.5 million over five years. This program aims to create a comprehensive, open-source platform that integrates data across genomics, pharmacology, clinical research, patient care and more.

“We’re living in an era where we have access to tremendous amounts of data—both scientific and clinical—but the challenge lies in translating that into actionable knowledge,” says Andrew Su, PhD, co-principal investigator of the new award and a professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research. “With this renewed support from NCATS, we can continue to build a unified data ecosystem that empowers both researchers and clinicians to uncover connections that were previously hidden.”

Launched in 2016, Translator brings together institutes from across the country—including Scripps Research—to develop a platform capable of integrating diverse biomedical datasets. These include biomedical research findings, clinical interactions, health records, clinical trial results and more. By unifying and contextualizing these resources, the Translator could enable users to explore complex biological relationships and generate new hypotheses about disease mechanisms, drug effects and potential therapeutic targets.

The resulting platform—designed for use by scientists, clinicians and informaticians alike—is already demonstrating its utility. In 2024, the Translator team received an NIH Director’s Award for “exceptional performance and significant contributions” to translational science. The platform’s architecture, user interface and early insights were also recently detailed in a paper published in Clinical and Translational Science.

At Scripps Research, Su’s lab specializes in developing computational tools that make sense of the vast streams of medical and scientific data generated every day. The institute’s contribution to the Translator initiative also involves the lab of Chunlei Wu, whose team focuses on building scalable, AI-driven infrastructure to improve data consolidation.

“The scientific and clinical worlds often operate in silos, with datasets that aren’t necessarily compatible,” says Wu, who is the co-principal investigator and also a professor in the Department of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research. “Translator is helping lay the groundwork for a next-generation research platform that can unite these communities—one that could ultimately accelerate progress in everything from rare disease diagnostics to personalized medicine.”

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