AI for Medicine

A high-profile acquisition could enable Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to offer built-in agents that do users’ bidding.

OpenAI and Anthropic staked claims in the lucrative healthcare market, each company playing to its strengths by targeting different audiences.

An open protocol aims to enable AI agents to conduct scientific research autonomously across disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

Over the past few years, we have seen rapid progress in models that jointly reason over text, images, sequences, graphs, and time series. Yet in biomedical settings, these capabilities often remain fragmented, brittle, or difficult to interpret.

In 2026, I hope AI will transition from being a tool for efficiency to a catalyst for scientific discovery.

President Trump launched a United States effort to use AI to speed up scientific breakthroughs.

The world’s biggest pharmaceutical company by revenue shed light on its AI strategy.

A critical step in diagnosing illnesses is a conversation between doctor and patient to assemble a medical history, discuss approaches to managing symptoms, and so on.

A deep learning model significantly reduced deaths among critically ill hospital patients.

The latest update of DeepMind’s AlphaFold model is designed to find the structures of not just proteins but all biologically active molecules as well as interactions between them.

A neural network detected early signs of pancreatic cancer more effectively than doctors who used the usual risk-assessment criteria. Researchers at MIT and oncologists at Beth Israel Medical Center in Boston...

Biologists used neural networks to find a new class of antibiotics. Researchers at MIT and Harvard trained models to screen chemical compounds for those that kill methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), the deadliest among bacteria that have...

A microscope enhanced with augmented reality is helping pathologists recognize cancerous tissue. The United States Department of Defense is using microscopes that use machine learning models based on research from Google to detect cancers.

The United States’ regulatory regime may not be clear or flexible enough to ensure the safety of AI-powered medical devices. Physicians and other health professionals believe that U.S. regulators have approved AI-powered medical products without proper oversight or disclosure.

Large language models may help psychiatrists resolve unanswered questions about mental illness. Researchers from University College London, Beijing Normal University, and Lisbon’s Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown used a large language model to...