Gabelli School Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center Hosts One-day Conference on AI and Healthcare: Beyond the Hype

While the world has been taken by storm through the use of more commonly known AI applications such as ChatGPT, there remains a void in what the public knows about the transformational changes that are occurring in the healthcare and pharma environment due to AI technology. The deeply enlightening presentations delivered by renowned experts at the February 1 “AI and Healthcare: Beyond the Hype” conference, hosted by the Gabelli School’s Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center, revealed the incredible advances being made that will revolutionize the way we diagnose and treat disease.

Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., provost, senior vice president of academic affairs, and professor of chemistry, Fordham University, delivered opening remarks that set the stage for the day’s discussions on the challenges facing the healthcare industry and the potential for AI to revolutionize our healthcare systems. He was followed by Falguni Sen, Ph.D., director of the Global Healthcare Innovation Management Center and professor of strategy and statistics at the Gabelli School, who introduced two areas at the frontier of AI technology integration: drug discovery and healthcare delivery. The day’s presentations were inspirational, but also revealed the enormity of the ethical challenges that will need to be addressed as AI becomes the norm in the rapidly evolving healthcare environment.

Navid Asgari, Ph.D., associate professor and Grose Family Endowed Chair in Business, who shaped the content for the event, focused on AI: hype vs. reality, where the current narrative is either one of doom and gloom or the miraculous answer to all of the world’s problems. He encouraged the audience to reframe the narrative to appreciate the “incredible potential and complex challenges” of AI in healthcare. Dr. Roy Barnes, M.B., M.Med., Ph.D., executive vice president and chief medical officer, Eikon Therapeutics, followed with a presentation on “AI in Drug Discovery and Clinical Development.”

Thomas Fuchs, Ph.D., co-director of the Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai, dean of artificial intelligence and human health, and professor of computational pathology and computer science at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, presented on “Computational Pathology: AI’s Impact on Disease Diagnosis,” which focused on the future of pathology in an AI-driven world, and the impact of AI technology on the entire healthcare pipeline.

During her presentation on “AI in Pharma: Transforming Drug Development and Marketing,” Andree Bates, Ph.D., founder of Eularis, a company that applies mathematics to overcome pharmaceutical commercial challenges, focused on the ways in which AI will revolutionize drug development and supply chain management. Marc Paradis, vice president of data strategy for Northwell Holdings, delivered a presentation on “Data-Driven Healthcare: Transforming Patient Care,” which outlined the fundamental problems healthcare faces and the ways these challenges can be addressed using generative AI.

The last panel of the day titled “The Future of Data Strategy in Healthcare,” was moderated by Falguni Sen, Ph.D., and brought together Paradis and Amol Joshi, Ph.D., the Bern Beatty Fellow and an associate professor of strategic management at the Wake Forest University (WFU) School of Business, who focused on the importance of data and the ways it will be used to transform the healthcare industry. The conference closed with a lecture by Joshi titled “Bridging AI and Healthcare: An Innovation Perspective,” who concluded the event with a message of hope and excitement as we re-envision healthcare for the future.

—Paola Curcio-Kleinman, Michelle Miller

Conference panelists and speakers (l to r): Falguni Sen, Ph.D.; Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D.; Jeffrey Meckler, J.D.; Dr. Roy Barnes, M.B., M.Med., Ph.D.; Navid Asgari, Ph.D.; Lerzan Aksoy, Ph.D.; Andree Bates, Ph.D.; and Amol Joshi, Ph.D.