Professor Ebrahim Bagheri will lead a newly funded ($1.65 million) NSERC CREATE initiative that will train the next generation of researchers to use artificial intelligence as an active partner in health discovery.
The Agentic AI for Discovery in Health Sciences (AID4HS) program brings together universities, hospitals, industry, and government to advance the use of “agentic AI” — systems that can help design experiments, generate ideas, and synthesize knowledge in real time as opposed to just analyzing data after the fact. By embedding AI more directly into the research process, AID4HS aims to accelerate scientific discovery and strengthen Canada’s capacity in both health and artificial intelligence.
“Several early examples suggest that AI is beginning to act as a knowledgeable research collaborator especially within the health sciences domain, although most of the current work is still preclinical or research-stage,” said Bagheri. Two well-known examples of this come from Google’s AI co-scientist, he added. It has independently discovered unpublished findings on bacterial gene transfer mechanisms relevant to antimicrobial resistance and also proposed drug-repurposing candidates that could be used to treat Acute Myeloid Leukemia.
Read about Professor Bagheri’s work on safeguarding justice in the age of AI.
The illustration for this article was created with AI.
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