HTL’s Aaron Aguirre wins the $3M Rappaport MGH Grand Challenge Award

The Healthcare Transformation Lab is proud to share that HTL’s Aaron Aguirre, MD, PhD has been awarded the 2026 Rappaport MGH Grand Challenge Award — a $3 million initiative supporting multidisciplinary teams tackling the most pressing challenges in medicine. Made possible by a visionary gift from the Phyllis & Jerome Lyle Rappaport Foundation, this year’s award was dedicated to the theme A Systems-Level View of Human Disease.

Aguirre’s winning project, Understanding and Preventing In-Hospital Cardiac Arrest and Post-Arrest Brain Injury using AI: A Multi-Institute MGB Moonshot, was the top-ranked proposal selected from a highly competitive pool of 107 letters of intent and 32 invited full proposals — chosen for its breakthrough potential for patients.

The challenge. In-hospital cardiac arrest is one of medicine’s most devastating emergencies. The project aims to transform the chain of survival by enabling earlier intervention — before an arrest occurs — and more precise protection of the brain afterward.

The approach. By leveraging unique multimodal clinical data from across Mass General Brigham together with advanced AI, the team will work to uncover the biologic pathways that drive patient deterioration and brain injury. Those insights will be translated into next-generation early-warning systems and treatment-guidance models — tools that could improve survival, reduce life-altering neurologic injury, and support better recovery for patients after cardiac arrest.

The team. Led by Aguirre, the project unites investigators from across Mass General Brigham — spanning the Heart & Vascular Institute, the Neuroscience Institute, the Cancer Institute, Pathology, and the MGH Center for Systems Biology — reflecting the kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration the Rappaport Grand Challenge is designed to support.

Congratulations to Aaron and the full team on this remarkable recognition — and on the potential it holds to change outcomes for patients facing one of medicine’s hardest emergencies.