An Indiana team, Aletheia, was selected as one of five finalists to compete for the $1 million Alzheimer’s Insights AI Prize sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Disease Data Initiative (ADDI). The ADDI aims to accelerate Alzheimer’s research and discovery using visionary agentic AI solutions.
The Aletheia team is a collaboration between Indiana University School of Medicine, the Indiana Biosciences Research Institute (IBRI), and Notre Dame University. Aletheia was selected from more than 180 teams worldwide to be among the 10 semifinalists at the Alzheimer's disease summit in San Diego in December of 2025.
Travis S. Johnson, PhD, MSPH, assistant professor of biostatistics and health data science at IU School of Medicine and director of bioinformatics at IBRI, presented the pitch and demo with Notre Dame student Xueyang Li. The Aletheia project is an agentic AI system that is designed to operate inside the AD workbench that turns a natural language research goal into an automated workflow from data preparation to evidence-based target determination and early drug discovery. It replaces slow, manual, fragmented workflows with a single, language-prompted pipeline so more teams, worldwide, can move faster from data to discovery. The goal is to improve the quality of data analyses and speed of the process by using agentic AI to streamline complex workflows.
The Aletheia team also includes Kun Huang, PhD, chair of the Department of Biostatistics and Health Data Science; Jie Zhang, PhD, associate professor of medical and molecular genetics; Yijie Wang, PhD, associate professor in the IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering; Tim Richardson, PhD, senior research professor of medicine in the Division of Clinical Pharmacology; Jeff Dage, PhD, senior research professor of neurology; Yiyu Shi, PhD, professor of computer science and engineering at Notre Dame; Shuqing Wu, engineering PhD student at Notre Dame; and Jiahui Liu, biostatistics PhD student at the IU Richard M. Fairbanks School of Public Health.
The team pitched their idea to a panel of judges including Eric Horvitz, chief science officer of Microsoft. Aletheia was successful and chosen as one of five finalists in the contest.
The final pitch was held in Copenhagen, Denmark at the 20th International Conference on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's Diseases, in March 2026. Although the Aletheia project was not chosen as the winner of the contest, the project does help accelerate the pace of research using agentic AI tools now available. These efforts are ongoing through a partnership with IU School of Medicine, IBRI and Notre Dame to develop state-of-the-art agentic AI systems for scientific reasoning. Participating in the contest also allows researchers to meet and form new collaborations. Brilliant minds all over the world are working together toward solutions to conditions that will affect millions of people.
