This is part I of a two-part blog series recapping the 2018 BIO International Convention.

At the 2018 BIO International Convention last week, it was clear what’s provoking scientific minds in industry and academia — or at least those of the Guinness-world-record-making 16,000 people in attendance. Artificial intelligence, machine learning and their implications for tailor-made medicine bubbled up across all BIO’s educational tracks and a majority of discussions about the future state of biotechnology. Panelists from Boston Children’s Hospital also contributed their insights to what’s brewing at the intersection of these burgeoning fields.

Isaac Kohane, MD, PhD, former chair of Boston Children’s Computational Health and Informatics Program, spoke on a panel about how large-scale patient data — if properly harnessed and analyzed for health and disease trends — is a virtual goldmine for precision medicine insights. Patterns gleaned from population health data or electronic health records, for example, could help identify which subgroups of patients who might respond better to specific therapies.

According to Kohane, who is currently the Marion J. Nelson Professor of Biomedical Informatics and Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School (HMS), we will soon be leveraging artificial intelligence to go through patient records and determine exactly what doctors were thinking when they saw patients.

“We’ve seen again and again that data abstraction by artificial intelligence is better than abstraction by human analysts when performed at the scale of millions of clinical notes across thousands of patients,” said Kohane.

And based on what we heard at BIO, artificial intelligence will revolutionize more than patient data mining. It will also transform the way we design precision therapeutics — and even vaccines — from the ground up. …