Single Source for Establishing Pilot/Opportunity program for AI Models to Accelerate Diabetes Research (U24- Clinical Trials not allowed)

<p style="margin-left:0in;">Diabetes&nbsp;has&nbsp;become&nbsp;a major&nbsp;public&nbsp;health&nbsp;challenge due&nbsp;to&nbsp;its high&nbsp;prevalence&nbsp;and&nbsp;chronic&nbsp;nature,&nbsp;with many individuals managing the condition for decades.&nbsp;One major challenge in diabetes is the enormous heterogeneity&nbsp;associated&nbsp;with&nbsp;the&nbsp;disease,&nbsp;which&nbsp;necessitates&nbsp;personalized&nbsp;approaches&nbsp;to&nbsp;its&nbsp;prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis.&nbsp;To address this, the research field has generated a large amount of complex data, and has accumulated vast prior knowledge about the disease.&nbsp;These data and prior knowledge&nbsp;contain&nbsp;critical,&nbsp;but&nbsp;mostly&nbsp;hidden,&nbsp;information&nbsp;relevant&nbsp;to&nbsp;solving&nbsp;this&nbsp;challenge.&nbsp;However, major hurdles exist in integrating them and extracting predictive signals, including a lack of data science expertise in the diabetes research field and the absence of diabetes-specific data science and AI expert systems, models, and tools.

This initiative proposes to address these issues by establishing a pilot&nbsp;funding&nbsp;program&nbsp;that&nbsp;leverages&nbsp;the&nbsp;emerging&nbsp;opportunities&nbsp;from&nbsp;recent&nbsp;data&nbsp;science&nbsp;and&nbsp;AI&nbsp;advances.&nbsp;It will&nbsp;recruit&nbsp;multidisciplinary&nbsp;teams&nbsp;that&nbsp;include&nbsp;both&nbsp;diabetes&nbsp;and&nbsp;data&nbsp;science&nbsp;experts,&nbsp;to&nbsp;(1)&nbsp;develop&nbsp;AI foundation models for diabetes; (2) validate the models with top research questions in diabetes heterogeneity; (3) disseminate the models and engagement the community for further development, validation and application, and; (4) develop use cases that demonstrate models’ potential in accelerating the&nbsp;tempo&nbsp;of&nbsp;research.&nbsp;The&nbsp;expected&nbsp;outcomes&nbsp;include&nbsp;the&nbsp;integration&nbsp;of&nbsp;new&nbsp;AI&nbsp;experts&nbsp;into&nbsp;the diabetes&nbsp;research&nbsp;workforce,&nbsp;the&nbsp;creation&nbsp;of&nbsp;AI&nbsp;models&nbsp;that&nbsp;the&nbsp;average&nbsp;diabetes&nbsp;researcher&nbsp;can&nbsp;use,&nbsp;and informative use cases demonstrating the models' potential.</p><p style="margin-left:0in;">All applications will be peer-reviewed and only meritorious applications will be considered for funding.&nbsp;</p>