AI permeates every aspect of healthcare – from genomic research to drug discovery, clinical trial workflow and patient care.
In a panel discussion Monday during the annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang took the stage with industry leaders who are advancing each of these areas to advance biomedical science and meet the global need for patient care.
Health care has a greater labor shortage than any other sector – the industry is expected to be 10 million short-staffed by the end of the decade, according to the World Health Organization. By deploying basic models to narrow down the field of potential drug molecules and simplifying workflows with agent AI, these inventors are helping to meet global demand by enabling doctors and researchers to achieve more with their limited time.
They include industry luminaries Patrick Collison, founder of Stripe and the nonprofit research organization Arc Institute; Christina Zorn, chief administrative officer at the Mayo Clinic; Jacob Thaysen, CEO of DNA sequencing technology leader Illumina; and Ari Bousbib, chairman and CEO of medical research and commercial services provider IQVIA.
Four organizations in JP Morgan Healthcare announced a partnership with NVIDIA to improve drug discovery, accelerate disease, improve genomic research and augment healthcare with agent AI, respectively.
The Evolution of AI, From Prediction to Inference
Huang opened the event by looking at the major advances in AI over the past year, including large-scale linguistic models, virtual generative AI and portable robotic AI – and envisioning a future involving agency AI models capable of reasoning and problem-solving.
“The future of AI is likely to involve a fair amount of thinking,” he said. “AI's ability now to think, plan and act is fundamental to how we will move forward.”
To support the development of these types of AI, NVIDIA recently launched NVIDIA Cosmos, a virtual AI platform that combines world-based models that generate state-of-the-art art. These models use the same approach as a language model that predicts the next word in a sentence — instead predicting the next action the robot should take.
“The idea that you can create the next frame of video has become common sense,” Huang said. “And if that's the case, would it be possible to generate the following propaganda that would be a good idea?” And the answer is perfect. “
AI for all modes
Acting as a late-night talk show host, Huang called on guest speakers one by one to discuss their work accelerating biomedical research through AI innovation.
First up was Collison, who shared the Arc Institute's mission to help researchers tackle long-term scientific challenges by providing them with multi-year grants that enable them to focus on new research instead of writing grants – which he believes will promote success that will not be easy to track under the current climate. financial models.
“A lot of the low-hanging fruit, the things that are easy to find, we've done,” Collison said, referring to the development of basic therapies like antibiotics, chemotherapy and more over the past decades. “Today, it's very difficult.”
Already, the Arc Institute's investment has led to Evo, a powerful base model that understands the languages of DNA, RNA and proteins. The center is now collaborating with NVIDIA on basic biological models that can advance applications in drug discovery, synthetic biology across multiple scales of complexity, disease and evolution research, and more.
Next, Mayo Clinic's Zorn shared how the research hospital is using NVIDIA technology in one of the world's largest pathology databases to transform cancer care with AI insights.
“We have seen a paradigm shift in health care. Either you will disturb inside or you will be disturbed,” he said. “We knew we had to embrace technology in a way that would improve everything we do.”
Zorn also shared how the Mayo Clinic is approaching future healthcare workforce shortages by investing in robotics.
“We will use, in fact, robots to be a member of the health care team in health care facilities,” he said.
An evening wrapped up with two leaders in healthcare information demonstrating how multimodal AI models can gain insights and guide processes to improve the skills of human professionals.
“Integrating other information, other methods, other 'notices'…will give us a deeper understanding of biology. “But while DNA was very difficult, when you put all omics together, it becomes a much bigger challenge,” said Illumina's Thaysen. “It's getting so complex that we need massive computing power and AI to really understand and process it.”
IQVIA is working with NVIDIA to build custom foundational models and AI workflows trained on the organization's vast healthcare-specific knowledge and deep domain expertise. Use cases include increasing the efficiency of clinical trials and improving the planning of the introduction of therapeutic drugs and medical devices.
The company is committed to using AI responsibly, ensuring that its AI-powered capabilities are based on privacy, compliance and patient safety.
“The opportunity here is to try to reduce the dependency and sequential chain of steps that require a lot of communication, and to deal with them without human contact,” Bousbib said. “AI agents will be able to eliminate the white space, that is, the time waiting for people to complete those tasks. There is a great opportunity to reduce time and cost.”
NVIDIA at JP Morgan Healthcare
The fireside discussion followed a presentation at the conference by Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA's vice president for healthcare. In his speech, Powell discussed industry partnerships and announced new resources for health and life sciences developers.
These include the NVIDIA NIM microservice for GenMol, a generative AI model for controlled, high-performance molecular manufacturing – and the NVIDIA BioNeMo Blueprint for protein binder design, part of the NVIDIA Blueprints collection of enterprise-grade reference workflows for used AI for production and productivity. cases.
For more from NVIDIA at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, listen to the audio recording of Powell's session.
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The main photo above features, from left to right, Illumina's Jacob Thaysen, Mayo Clinic's Christina Zorn, Arc Institute's Patrick Collison, IQVIA's Ari Bousbib and NVIDIA's Jensen Huang.
