{"id":20113,"date":"2026-05-06T11:01:00","date_gmt":"2026-05-06T15:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/?p=20113"},"modified":"2026-05-06T17:21:38","modified_gmt":"2026-05-06T21:21:38","slug":"zhang-nih-ai-drug-repurposing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/2026\/05\/06\/zhang-nih-ai-drug-repurposing\/","title":{"rendered":"CDS\u2019s Xuezhou Zhang Secures NIH Funding for AI-Driven Drug Repurposing Collaboration"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Photo<\/p>\n

\"Headshot
CDS Assistant Professor Xuezhou “Jack” Zhang<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences (CDS) at Boston University is pleased to announce that Assistant Professor of Computing & Data Sciences Xuezhou \u201cJack\u201d Zhang<\/a> has secured $450,000 in funding from the National Institutes of Health: National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences for his research on AI-driven drug repurposing. Zhang is the co-principal investigator on this two-year project, \u201cAI-Driven Biomedical Knowledge Hypergraphs for Interpretable Drug Repurposing and Precision Therapy,\u201d collaborating with fellow BU faculty member Huimin Cheng<\/a>, assistant professor of biostatistics in BU\u2019s School of Public Health.<\/p>\n

Computational drug repurposing\u2013identifying and developing new medical uses for existing drugs\u2013offers a promising pathway to address persistent challenges in developing treatments for rare and understudied diseases. However, existing approaches are often constrained by limited representations of biomedical knowledge and a lack of generalizable, interpretable predictive models.<\/p>\n

To overcome these limitations, Zhang and Cheng aim to advance drug repurposing methodologies by transitioning from traditional knowledge graphs to biomedical hypergraphs. Unlike standard pairwise graph models, hypergraphs enable the representation of higher-order relationships, capturing complex interactions among drug combinations, genetic mutations, and patient populations. Their team will use a reinforcement learning-enhanced large language model (RL-LLM) to extract multi-entity relationships from scientific literature through a human-in-the-loop process, which is an AI design approach that incorporates human interaction, oversight, and judgment into machine learning cycles. Then, they will apply Hypergraph Neural Networks (HyperGNNs) with heterogeneous attention to predict novel therapeutic uses for previously developed drugs.<\/p>\n

Azer Bestavros<\/a>, Associate Provost for Computing & Data Sciences, noted: \u201cThis SPH-CDS collaboration is a perfect example of the premise (and prowess) of \u2018AI for Science\u2019 and underscores the critical role that CDS plays as the catalyst for AI-driven convergent research at BU.\u201d<\/p>\n

With this NIH support, Zhang and Cheng will expand precision therapy possibilities and accelerate biomedical discovery. Their research exemplifies the integral role of data science and AI in propelling both science and medicine forward.<\/p>\n

Congratulations to Xuezhou Zhang and Huimin Cheng for this well-deserved achievement and their remarkable work!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Read about CDS Assistant Professor Xuezhou \u201cJack\u201d Zhang’s award-winning research on AI-driven drug repurposing and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25279,"featured_media":20136,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[427,251,5,232,230,244],"tags":[377,27,525,501,878,299,378],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20113"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25279"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20113"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20113\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20139,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20113\/revisions\/20139"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/cds-faculty\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}