Fred Hutch AI Club - September 2026 Talk
Can AI help create a “virtual patient” and transform how new treatments are discovered? Join Hoifung Poon, PhD, from Recursion AI (previously Microsoft Research) to explore how multimodal generative AI could accelerate medical discovery through digital twins and virtual clinical trials.
Abstract:
Human biology stems from four billion years of evolution, which creates a proliferation of complexity and heterogeneity. The combinatorial explosion of biological hypotheses easily surpasses the number of atoms in the universe. Meanwhile, biomedical discovery advances at the snail pace of clinical trials, each taking years and costing over $100 million. As we enter the era of precision health and try to tailor treatments for each individual, continuing on today's discovery processes is clearly unsustainable. Our overarching research agenda lies in advancing multimodal generative AI to create a biomedical world model by bridging virtual patient and virtual cell, thus turning real-world patient journeys into a discovery engine through a generalized lab-in-the-loop flywheel. This enables us to synthesize population-scale real-world evidence from hundreds of millions of patients and accelerate biomedical discovery through AI-powered virtual clinical trials. This in turn fuels diverse applications from imminent productivity gains via automating digitized knowledge work, to moonshot creativity gains via creating biomedical wind tunnels for in silico simulation. By leveraging AI to close the loop across clinical care and frontier research, we have a clear line of sight toward scalable drug discovery.
Free