Description of Talk here
Overview: The drug discovery process remains protracted, costly, and inefficient, particularly in the context of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s, where therapeutic development has seen limited success. In this keynote, Dr. Jianying Hu presents a comprehensive overview of how artificial intelligence (AI), including classical machine learning and emerging foundation models, is transforming the landscape of drug discovery. She outlines AI-driven strategies across the drug development pipeline—from target identification and molecular generation to disease progression modeling and clinical trial optimization. Highlighted applications include the use of hidden Markov models to construct integrated disease progression models for Huntington’s and Parkinson’s diseases, enabling nuanced patient stratification and improved trial design. Additionally, Dr. Hu discusses scalable causal inference frameworks for drug repurposing and the development of multimodal biomedical foundation models that integrate omics, molecular, and clinical data. These models support virtual screening, property prediction, and hypothesis generation. The talk concludes with a vision for compound AI systems—integrating large language models, domain-specific foundation models, and physics-based simulations—to realize an end-to-end AI-enhanced drug discovery ecosystem. This work underscores the transformative potential of AI in accelerating therapeutic innovation for complex, heterogeneous diseases.
Jianying Hu, PhD, Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences Research; Global Science Leader, AI for Health at IBM
About the speaker: Jianying Hu is an IBM Fellow and Global Science Leader of AI for Healthcare at IBM. She is also Adjunct Professor of Medicine at Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Hu joined IBM in 2003 after working at Bell Labs. She has over 30 years of experience conducting and leading research on machine learning, with recent focus on AI enabled acceleration of scientific discovery in health. Dr. Hu has served on many editorial and advisory boards, most recently on the NASEM Committee on Establishing a Framework for Emerging Science, Technology and Innovation in Health and Medicine, and the External Advisory Board of the NIH AIM-AHEAD Program. Dr. Hu is a fellow of the American College of Medical Informatics, International Academy of Health Sciences Informatics, IEEE, and the International Association of Pattern Recognition.
- Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jianying_Hu
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