The Future of Myeloma Treatment Through an AI Approach

The 21st annual International Myeloma Society meeting will take place in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil, from September 25 to 27. The conference will platform experts with a focus on the basic, preclinical, and clinical aspects of myeloma.

Anant Madabhushi, PhD, executive director for the Emory Empathetic AI for Health Institute, explained his excitement for his role as the keynote speaker for the 2024 International Myeloma Society (IMS) conference. He expressed hope for the prospects of applying artificial intelligence (AI) into the myeloma landscape and gaining perspective through a biomedical engineer lens.

This transcript was lightly edited for clarity.

Transcript

What are you looking forward to most as keynote speaker of the 2024 IMS conference?

I'm really excited about attending this meeting. This is my first time attending this particular meeting and, in fact, it's my first time attending any multiple myeloma meeting. As a biomedical engineer whose interest has been in the machine learning and AI space, I'm really interested in learning about multiple myeloma and trying to understand the opportunities for the use of technologies like AI and machine learning in the context of myeloma. Certainly a big part of that is first understanding a little bit more about the disease and about where the unmet clinical need is.

I'm really looking forward to meeting clinicians who are working in the space to also understand their pain points. I think this is really important for us who are on the machine learning AI side so we can really get a pulse on the aspects of the problem that really require attention, because you don't really want to have the situation where you got a hammer and everything looks like a nail. A big part of that is really fundamentally understanding where the problem is and where the unmet need is, and that means interacting with clinicians. I'm really looking forward to learning more about multiple myeloma, connecting with clinicians, and understanding their pain points.

What are you hoping audiences take away from your session "AI in Multiple Myeloma: Recent Findings and Opportunities"?

Hopefully my goal through my talk would be to convey the huge opportunity of these technologies for several other cancers, and really show some of the progress that we've made in better diagnosis, but also prognosis and prediction of treatment response for many other cancer types. I want to really try to illustrate the tremendous opportunity of these technologies in the context of multiple myeloma.

I'm not going to have too much to be able to share with the audience on work that we've done in the context of multiple myeloma. I'll have maybe a couple of different projects where we've got some very initial interesting data that I'll be sharing but really, the goal will be to hopefully get the juices running for folks in the audience with some of the data that we've generated in the context, particularly of other solid tumors.