AI is permeating the entire healthcare industry, from genomic research to drug discovery, clinical trial workflows, and patient care.
In a fireside conversation Monday at the annual JPMorgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang talks about advancing biomedical science and meeting global demands for patient care. I joined industry leaders who are driving each of these areas forward to take the stage.
The health care industry has the worst labor shortage of any other sector, with the World Health Organization predicting there will be a shortage of 10 million workers by the end of 2020. These innovators deploy fundamental models to narrow down the field of potential drug molecules and streamline workflows with agent AI, helping clinicians and researchers achieve more in less time. By doing so, we are helping to meet global demand.
They include industry luminary Patrick Collison, co-founder of Stripe and the nonprofit research organization Ark Institute. Christina Zorn, Chief Administrative Officer, Mayo Clinic; Jacob Theisen, CEO of Illumina, a leader in DNA sequencing technology. Ari Bousbib, Chairman and CEO of IQVIA, a clinical research and commercial services provider;
Four JPMorgan Healthcare organizations announced partnerships with NVIDIA to advance drug discovery, accelerate pathology, enhance genomic research, and empower healthcare with agent AI.
Evolution of AI, from prediction to inference
Huang reflects on the incredible advances in AI over the past year, ranging from large-scale language models, visual generation AI, and physical AI for robotics, and looks forward to the future, including agent AI models capable of reasoning and problem-solving. We opened the event by outlining our vision. Resolving.
“The future of AI is going to require a significant amount of thinking,” he says. “AI’s ability to reason, plan, and act is fundamental to our path forward.”
To support the development of these AI models, NVIDIA recently announced NVIDIA Cosmos, a physical AI platform that includes state-of-the-art generative world foundation models. These models apply the same techniques as language models that predict the next word in a sentence, and instead predict the next action the robot should take.
“The idea that you can generate the next frame of a video has become common knowledge,” Huang says. “If so, is it possible that generating the following articulations becomes common knowledge? And the answer is absolutely.”
AI for every modality
Channeling late-night talk show hosts, Huang brought in guest speakers one by one to discuss their efforts to accelerate biomedical research with AI innovation.
First up was Collison, who helps researchers tackle long-term scientific challenges by providing multi-year funding so they can focus on innovative research rather than grant writing. They shared Ark Research Institute’s mission to He believes this will facilitate breakthroughs that would be impossible to pursue under today’s conditions. Funding model.
“We’ve achieved many of the low-hanging fruit,” Collison said, referring to the development of breakthrough treatments such as antibiotics and chemotherapy over the past several decades. “It’s very difficult today.”
Already, Arc Institute’s investment has led to Evo, a powerful foundational model that understands the language of DNA, RNA, and proteins. The Institute is currently working with NVIDIA on fundamental biological models that can advance applications such as drug discovery, synthetic biology across multiple scales of complexity, and disease and evolution research.
Next, Mayo Clinic’s Zorn shared how the research hospital is applying NVIDIA technology to 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 we are destroyed from within, or we are destroyed,” she said. “We knew we needed to leverage technology in a way that really optimized everything we do.”
Zorn also shared how Mayo Clinic is addressing future health care worker shortages by investing in robotics.
“We’re basically going to use robots in the medical field as part of the medical team,” she said.
The evening concluded with two leaders in the medical informatics field reflecting on how multimodal AI models can uncover insights, streamline processes, and enhance the capabilities of human experts.
“Combining other information, other modalities, other ‘omics’ will give us deeper insights into biology. But while DNA itself was very difficult, when you combine all the omics, it becomes exponentially more difficult,” Illumina’s Theisen said. “It’s become so complex that it takes a huge amount of computing power and AI to really understand and process it.”
IQVIA is collaborating with NVIDIA to build custom foundational models and agent AI workflows trained on the organization’s vast healthcare-specific information and deep expertise. Use cases include increasing the efficiency of clinical trials and optimizing therapeutic and medical device launch plans.
The company is committed to using AI responsibly, ensuring that AI-powered features are based on privacy, regulatory compliance, and patient safety.
“The opportunity here is to reduce dependencies and sequences of steps that require a lot of interaction so that they can be processed without human intervention,” Boothbibb says. “AI agents will be able to eliminate white space, or time spent waiting for a human to complete a task. There is a huge opportunity to reduce time and cost.”
JP Morgan Healthcare’s NVIDIA
The fireside chat followed a conference presentation by Kimberly Powell, NVIDIA’s vice president of healthcare. During his talk, Powell talked about industry collaboration and announced new resources for healthcare and life sciences developers.
These include NVIDIA NIM microservices for GenMol, a generative AI model for controlled, high-performance molecule generation, and part of the NVIDIA Blueprints collection of enterprise-grade reference workflows for using agents and generative AI. Contains NVIDIA BioNeMo blueprints for protein binder design. case.
To learn more about NVIDIA at the JPMorgan Healthcare Conference, listen to the audio recording of Powell’s session.
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