AI in Medicine Making and Healthcare: Finding the Balance

By Deborah Borfitz

August 12, 2025 | The pharma industry excels at collaborating with startup companies and scaling up the production of drugs and biologics, but they may be missing the big-picture perspective of the U.S. government as well as some of the cutting-edge research happening within academia. It’s a problematic norm that needs addressing if artificial intelligence (AI) is to benefit drug discovery and diagnostics as well as healthcare delivery in terms of safety, equity, and effectiveness, according to Shruthi Bharadwaj, Ph.D., program leader at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, an R&D center funded largely by the Department of Defense (DOD). 

To that end, Bharadwaj will take to the stage at the upcoming Discovery on Target (DOT) conference in Boston to moderate a discussion about how to balance innovation, regulation, and real-world impact of AI in the life sciences and healthcare. At the table there will be representatives from industry, academia, and the federal government to discover and explore all the potential synergies, she says. 

Joining her on the panel will be Nimita Limaye, Ph.D., research vice president for life sciences R&D strategy and technology at International Data Corporation (IDC); Sherri Cherry, MBA, deputy chief information officer at the Defense Health Agency (part of the Veterans Health Administration); Raquel Mura, PharmD, founder of RGM Life Sciences Consulting and former vice president and head of R&D North America at Sanofi; and William Streilein, Ph.D., principal staff with the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. 

Fostering Change

Bharadwaj, who has a pharmaceutical biology background, recently joined MIT after working for two major pharmaceutical companies—first Novartis and later Sanofi—to head a team focused on leveraging AI for drug discovery. The Lincoln Laboratory has frequently convened multi-stakeholder groups to foster needed change in the way AI is viewed and deployed for the common good, she notes. 

Her focus currently is an initiative seeking to understand how AI can be leveraged to predict the characteristics of drug molecules, which may in the future help the Food and Drug Administration better assess the safety and effectiveness of candidate medicines, she says. The work is supported by an unnamed but non-DOD government agency. 

Outside of the MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Bharadwaj wears a few different hats. These include serving as an advisor to the Cancer Fund, an early-stage impact venture capital (VC) firm, by helping to evaluate startup proposals “for my own personal happiness,” she says. 

Additionally, Bharadwaj is an entrepreneur-in-residence at the Technology Innovation Studio (Cambridge, Massachusetts) that brings together business leaders, scientists and researchers, serial entrepreneurs, angel/VC investors, industry experts, corporate innovation teams, and policy experts to pursue fresh approaches to problems. And for Nucleate, a student-led organization helping startups spin out of academia, she provides guidance on the development of pitch decks and connects researchers with potential sponsors or VCs.   

Military Health

The Defense Health Agency, for its part, is keyed in on how AI might benefit the healthcare of veterans, Bharadwaj says, for example the diagnosis of mental health conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder, suicide ideation, and depression. The possibilities include AI-assisted vocal analysis, predictive analytics to identify at-risk individuals, and the analysis of physiological data from wearables as well as text and language patterns. 

Cherry is a strong advocate for women’s health, which may not yet have a use case for AI but is what connected her to Bharadwaj. What sparked their initial conversation was Bharadwaj’s interest in ensuring women are considered when creating strategies for increasing the overall effectiveness of the military, since 20% of service members are female. 

Equity is clearly a challenge in the miliary, Bharadwaj says. The MIT Lincoln Laboratory is now working with a company to address some of these situations. 

The inequities are many and extend to military uniforms that are designed for the height and size of men, she adds. Women generally don’t share the same general body build and proportions, meaning their comfort and morale as well as their safety and effectiveness in the field may be negatively affected. 

AI-guided Pipeline 

Many pharma companies are “pushing forward with AI or at least leveraging AI to some extent,” says Bharadwaj, which certainly includes both of her former employers. “Sanofi has been all in with AI for the last three years now,” aided by the 2023 hiring of venture capitalist and cardiology-trained Houman Ashrafian as its new head of R&D. 

Since then, Sanofi’s strategic vision has focused more on being “an immunoscience company that’s powered by AI,” Bharadwaj continues. “The entire drug discovery pipeline is guided by AI, so Sanofi decides what the next drug candidate should be in oncology or dermatology based on AI recommendations; it’s pretty awesome actually.” 

The recommendations are being made by predictive tools, which are inherently different than the large language models many people are familiar with by now, she adds. These are machine learning algorithms designed to analyze information such as chemical structures, biological activity, and clinical trial data to predict outcomes like drug properties, bioactivity, and toxicity. At Sanofi, Aily Labs has been a significant partner in building this sort of AI capability. 

Novartis has moved at a swifter pace of adoption, having launched a first-of-its-kind AI Innovation Lab through a collaboration with Microsoft back in 2019 when Bharadwaj was part of the digital team. The initiative integrated AI and data science across the company’s operations from R&D to commercialization.  

Connecting the Dots

The perspective of MIT Lincoln Laboratory’s William Streilein, who previously served as the chief AI and data officer for the DOD, could be particularly valuable to the overall conversation at the DOT conference. “He understands the U.S. government like no other... when it comes especially to AI and the implementation of AI and understanding how the government may see AI in the future,” says Bharadwaj. 

The Department of Defense, while less focused on the life sciences, is immersed in AI and Streilein will be at liberty to share some of the particulars. As has already been publicly disclosed, it has been involved in efforts to establish new data centers to support AI applications. 

One of Bharadwaj’s near-term intentions is to spotlight some of the “amazing work that MIT scientists have done but is not necessarily published or known to everyone... and connect them to pharma and perhaps the U.S. government,” she says. She wants also to help ensure that industry stays focused on the shared goal to “benefit humankind,” in part by better understanding the role of regulators and how to scale up research-level discoveries and not get distracted by the minutiae of drug making.