During her address to MassBio’s 2025 State of Possible Conference, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey noted that artificial intelligence originally was discovered in the state. So, it should come as no surprise that harnessing AI to maintain Massachusetts’ status as the world’s premiere life science industry hub was one of the key topics discussed throughout the conference.
MassBio identified in its recent Vision 2030 strategic plan that leveraging AI across the life science value chain is a significant part of the overall opportunity to grow techbio. State of Possible speaker Lucy Pérez, a senior partner at McKinsey and contributor to the Vision 2030 report, defined techbio as the convergence happening between the technology and biotechnology industries.
Given Massachusetts’ leadership role in both these industries, Pérez’s presentation at the conference explained why the Massachusetts life science industry needs to capitalize on this advantage. She discussed that competition for life science leadership is fierce from countries including China, Germany, Canada, and the United Kingdom. This is in addition to competition from U.S. states such as California, New Jersey, North Carolina, and New York.
“How can we continue to demonstrate that Massachusetts is the natural home where innovation and entrepreneurship come together to drive patient impact,” asked Perez.
AI’s Wide Range of Use Case Opportunities
Enter techbio and AI. The “Expanding Techbio” panel expressed optimism about AI’s ability to transform many aspects of drug research and development.
“The possibilities are endless,” said panelist and senior customer engineer AI/ML for Google Cloud Stephanie Gervasi.
Gervasi is excited about how AI can support precision medicine to develop customized treatments for individual patients that are truly the best treatment for them based on their biology and specific disease.
The panel discussed how AI can support initial drug targets by using the technology to run experiments on disease models. Moderator Jeff Elton, CEO of ConcertAI, an AI-powered SaaS company working with healthcare organizations, noted analyst reporting that during the next three years the top 50 pharma companies in the world will have some AI-enabled portions of their drug development programs.
Meanwhile, Ariel Bourla, head of solid tumor oncology data sciences at Johnson & Johnson, envisions AI’s role expanding well beyond uncovering drug targets.
Bourla discussed how AI can support several different aspects of the drug development process such as AI analyzing data it has about a disease and a potential drug candidate to generate research hypotheses. She also believes that AI can support clinical trials.
“Running a clinical trial on the site side is really burdensome,” said Bourla. “There are so many steps that are complicated and sites are begging for tools that can help.”
Bourla shared that AI could use historical data to help companies select the best sites for a particular trial, support trial recruitment, design trial protocols, and pull data from patient charts that can be integrated into trial systems.
The Road to Techbio Success
But for AI and techbio to see its full potential there are challenges that need to be conquered.
Colin Hill, who is the CEO and co-founder of Aitia, a biosimulation company, explained the importance of ensuring that AI identifies causal – rather than correlative – relationships. This means looking at AI beyond large language models (LLMs).
“Develop and deploy causal methods so you can de-risk what the drug is supposed to do against given clinical endpoints,” said Hill. “Get at mechanisms and causality from observational data to the greatest extent you can because that’s what’s going to move the needle.”
During the “Legends of Biotech” panel at the conference, Abbie Celniker, partner at Third Rock Ventures, indicated there was work to be done with implementing AI into the life sciences .
“AI is a sort of partner to all the human capital in the solution finding,” said Celniker. “And I think that we just don’t really understand well enough how to integrate it with the questions that we need to be asking.”
And this concern is one of the reasons why the Massachusetts workforce will be critical.
Even though Massachusetts has one of the top – if not the number one – academic ecosystems in the world, there are gaps in workforce development to fill. In her presentation about MassBio’s Vision 2030 report, Pérez said that only one-in-five life science graduates from Massachusetts universities stay in the state after graduating. As a result, more than 90% of startup employers are struggling to find talent. Pérez recommends more investment in workforce development and alignment to opportunities such as techbio.
Still, the speakers were confident that the life sciences industry will ultimately find success with AI and techbio.
“The bases are loaded and we are ready for some real home runs on both the discovery side and the clinical development side,” said Hill. “I think they are going to happen in Massachusetts.”
Myles Goldman is a public relations and public affairs professional with 10 years of experience working at the nexus of corporate communications, health care, and policy. Most recently he was account director of client experience on Current Global’s health care team, part of The Weber Shandwick Collective. You can find him on LinkedIn.
