It will make a significant contribution to the advancement of human health with the knowledge gained from working with AI. The foundation and OeAW were able to win Michael Bronstein, DeepMind Professor at the University of Oxford, as founding director of the Institute.

Two thirds of the funds required for the housing of the Institute will be provided by the Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research and one third by a grant from the City of Vienna. The Vienna Business Agency has been commissioned to construct a new building as the Institute's final location by the City of Vienna.

The German Boehringer Ingelheim Foundation (BIS), based in Mainz, is funding the establishment and operation of the AITHYRA Institute with €150 million over the next 12 years. This is the largest private research funding ever seen in Austria. Together with the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Foundation intends to establish an institute of excellence that is unique in Europe, in which researchers from the fields of AI and biomedical research combine their expertise from the start. Thus, the potential of AI for improving human health can be maximised. In the Foundation's search for a suitable environment, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and Vienna as a research location were able to convince the foundation in its competitive selection process.

The AITHYRA Institute is the first of its kind in Austria and Europe. It aims to combine the best research approaches from the world of academia, research-based companies, and start-ups and to work closely with Austrian and international universities and non-university scientific institutions. The goal is to gain a deeper understanding of biomedical interrelationships in order to better understand diseases, enable faster and more reliable diagnoses, and support the development of treatments for currently incurable diseases.

At the AITHYRA Institute, AI and life science experts will work closely together in a new way. AI researchers will be involved in biomedical research, experiments and data analysis from the very beginning - not only afterwards, as has been the case until now. Research will be conducted according to the highest ethical standards. The results and data will be made available to all researchers worldwide in accordance with the principle of open access.

Founding Director Michael Bronstein studied computer science and completed his doctorate at Technion - Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Before becoming a professor at Oxford, he held a professorship at Imperial College London as well as visiting professorships at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard. He has contributed to leading tech companies and is the successful founder of several start-ups.

Bronstein is internationally recognised as an expert in the field of machine learning and has successfully applied research results in academic spin-offs. In the course of his career, he has received five grants from the European Research Council (ERC) to date. To complement Bronstein's AI expertise, a high-ranking international search committee is currently looking to fill the position of biomedical director at the institute. Anita Ender, Administrative Director of the CeMM - Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, will take over the management of the AITHYRA Institute. As she will continue in her role at the CeMM, she will form a bridge to the medical Campus Vienna.

The AITHYRA Institute will be located in a newly constructed building at the Vienna BioCenter (VBC) in Wien-Landstraße. It will benefit from the successful life-science environment of university and non-university institutes. In addition to setting up its own state-of-the-art AI-controlled robotics laboratory, the AITHYRA Institute will also have access to the VBC infrastructure, which will enable numerous synergies. Until the new building is completed, which will also house the Institute, the Vienna Business Agency will provide the existing 'Marxbox' building in the immediate vicinity of the VBC.

To emphasise the forward-looking nature of the Institute, the project partners have decided to take an innovative approach to the process of naming the Institute. They have developed the name in collaboration with AI. In doing so, they have made one of the Institute's research principles the fundamental strategy in the naming process. To embody the spirit of AI and biomedicine, Greek mythology was used as inspiration and linked to the goals of the new institute - and AITHYRA was born.
According to the backstory generated by AI, she is the daughter of Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and Asclepius, the god of medicine, and is therefore its patron saint and source of inspiration. The Institute named after her aims to carry the history of biomedical research into the future.