Professor Regina Barzilay, faculty lead for AI at the MIT Jameel Clinic, the epicentre of AI and healthcare at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was among a group of experts asked by the American Association for Cancer Research about upcoming trends in cancer research and treatment in 2025. Read the full forecast published by the AACR on 10 January 2025.
My name is Regina Barzilay and I am professor of computer science and electrical engineering at MIT, and I am the AI lead for the Jameel Clinic, which is a centre for machine learning and health at MIT. I work on machine learning tools for diagnostics and for drug design.
What really excites me is all the new technology in molecular modelling, foundational models at the cell level, and advancement in computer vision that enable us to look, from all different directions, into the rich data that is collected about patients, to be able to predict who is likely to get the disease, how they're going to respond to treatment, and even what treatment would be optimal for the patients.
I think today we have machine learning tools that can bring together the biology, the chemistry and all the phenotypical data to really change our understanding of the disease and make breakthrough medicines.