Dr. Ruth Johnson, a 2023 Berkowitz Postdoctoral Fellow at HMS, and Dr. Marinka Zitnik, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at the Blavatnik Institute at HMS, visited the Clalit Research Institute in June 2023. They spent their time at Clalit's institute near Tel Aviv, leading a workshop on cutting-edge AI and its applications in precision medicine, disease diagnosis, and the development of innovative treatments. Additionally, Drs. Johnson and Zitnik hosted research seminars discussing ongoing research at Harvard. These seminars focused on foundational innovations in AI to enable new applications in individualized diagnosis and treatment, as well as on transitioning AI models into real-world implementation to benefit patients.
During their visit, Drs. Johnson and Zitnik gained hands-on experience with the institute's comprehensive healthcare datasets. Detailed snapshots of patients' medical histories spanning decades represent a unique resource made possible by the country's centralized approach to healthcare and its early adoption of electronic health record systems. This invaluable clinical database will be pivotal in developing AI tools aimed at providing individualized medical care.
Together with their Clalit partners, Drs. Johnson and Zitnik kickstarted several exciting research projects. These projects include developing knowledge-grounded learning systems to integrate research and patient data, augmentation of large language models to support medical reasoning, and designing all-disease models for the early identification of patients at risk. Foundation models, particularly large language models, are profoundly transforming the deep learning paradigm. Instead of training many task-specific models, it is now possible to adapt a single foundation model to various tasks through prompting and fine-tuning. These AI innovations present immense opportunities for precision medicine. However, they must be paired with safeguards that minimize risks and maximize benefits for patients. In collaboration with Clalit scientists, Drs. Johnson and Zitnik are pioneering new kinds of foundation models that perform diverse and impactful tasks, serving as all-disease predictive engines.