HH-02: Advanced Computing for Human Health
Imagine a future where advanced computing has revolutionized not just your doctor's appointment, but the entire healthcare landscape. In this future, during your routine check-up, an AI system analyzes a wealth of data – your genetic profile, biometric readings, lifestyle factors, and comprehensive medical history. Your provider can use this analysis to create a personalized health plan, optimizing treatments specifically for you. Beyond individual care, this technology offers a user-friendly interface with easy-to-understand information, accelerates medical research, streamlines healthcare delivery, and improves public health outcomes on a vast scale. It's a transformative shift, where rapid, data-driven medical advancements enhance healthcare efficiency, reduce costs, and position the U.S. as a pioneer in global health innovation.
The healthcare and biotechnology sectors are increasingly reliant on advanced computing, a field that is significantly impacting the bioeconomy. Using advanced computing in the health field faces myriad challenges, such as integrating different types of health data while ensuring patient accessibility and privacy and navigating the legal implications of using technological tools in diagnosis and treatment planning. Recent AI success stories--like development of AlphaFold by DeepMind for predicting protein structures from amino acid sequence information--demonstrate the profound impact of marrying foundational sciences with cutting-edge technology like AI and highlight the immense potential in this realm.
CASA-Bio stakeholders representing government, industry, and non-profit sectors, identified areas of mutual interest where concerted effort among them may lead more quickly to the realization of the envisioned future. These are a few of their ideas. Future R&D directions include developing computing technologies for biomedical applications, enhancing data sharing mechanisms and training the bioeconomy workforce to use them, creating automated manufacturing workflows and analytical tools (including AI), and developing digital twins plus integration of sensors to predict outcomes. These areas, while addressing patient safety, security, and privacy, have the potential to revolutionize human health research and treatment. We emphasize that this list is not comprehensive; we need you to help us think deeper within this subtheme!
As a member of the R&D community, you too are a CASA-Bio stakeholder, and providing your insight on R&D projects that undergird this sub-theme and lead to solutions is critical. Your ideas will matter! Your individual project ideas and those developed as part of the collaborative Town Hall process will be combined to produce an aggregate view. This view will help us understand not only the interests of the R&D community, but also what they are willing to do to advance the bioeconomy. Topics among the R&D project ideas we receive will help government, industry, and non-profit stakeholders see the potential of the US R&D community to address critical future needs and help define topics for future exploration through workshops and roadmapping.