Hoifung Poon

What these nihilistic vandals are doing to dismantle science & medicine—generations of expertise & public service & life improving benefits—is cultural revolution level national self harm. No foreign foe could inflict such brutal damage & senseless suffering on US so fast & effectively & unresisted.

a poster that says if life gives you lemon make lemonade on it ALT: a poster that says if life gives you lemon make lemonade on it

ATTENTION (PLEASE SHARE)

If anyone has or knows of any positions that might be appropriate for the NIH staff members who were terminated, please post the information in this thread.

There are lots of talented and accomplished people who may be looking for new opportunities.

The AP provides a model of effective press resistance Credibility is more important than access.

New in PN: The AP provides a model of effective press resistance

"The dispute over the name of the Gulf of Mexico seems trivial, especially compared to the others horrors Trump is currently perpetrating. But tyrants are tyrants in part bc they insist on asserting control over even trivial matters."

I wrote a book The Creative Destruction of Medicine (2013, title adopted after Schumpeter).

This title of the book for what we are now seeing in the U.S. is just The Destruction of Medicine.

I can't believe they've just cancelled the Epidemic Intelligence Service program at CDC.

This program trains the best & brightest epidemiologists, who then go on to have distinguished careers in public health, serving at CDC, in state health departments, overseas, ...

Imagine if @aoc @sanders.senate.gov , every dem, SIMULTANEOUSLY held Town Halls where they allowed grant and contract recipients to explain to the country what it is they do and why it's important

Invite all media. Including RW podcasters. @spaces Flood the zone

Call it a Day Of Transparency

This energy.

How a Canadian scientist and a venomous lizard helped pave the way for Ozempic - National | Globalnews.ca In 1984, Dr. Daniel Drucker, an endocrinologist from the University of Toronto, discovered a hormone that helped pave the way for popular diabetes drugs such as Ozempic.

This is the most relevant article to NIH and research cuts I’ve seen.

Imagine if this was today , how many people would be saying “Why are we studying Gila Monsters and their impact on diabetes ? That’s wasted money !”

globalnews.ca/news/9793403...

Another example of what cutting science funding is doing to our leading university research programs in the U.S.: dismantling things like the Soybean Innovation Lab at UIUC, which have made US crop yields dramatically higher.

I’ve been seething and grieving since yesterday’s Friday Night Massacre of NIH overheads, a seeming bit of bureaucratic trivial that will in fact destroy the US university system if unchecked. But I want to get away from budgets and rate breakdowns and F&A percentages for a moment.

Humor me?

We should not be allowing non-government employees to waltz in to government offices, and illegally get access to sensitive government and personal data, and get read and write access to critical software systems in multiple government agencies.

www.npr.org/2025/02/08/g...

Absurd time…

1. Today the NIH director issued a new directive slashing overhead rates to 15%.

I want to provide some context on what that means and why it matters.

grants.nih.gov/grants/guide...

If hostile foreign nations made a plan to destroy US influence and power, it would probably involve shutting down NIH and NSF

To help people understand the importance of NIH, share what you’ve used their funding for (in easily understandable terms).

I’ll start: my NIH postdoc funding helped me develop and test AI tools that could identify skin cancer across diverse skin tones.

This week's cover and editorial @thelancet.bsky.social on mis- and disinformation's impact on public health
www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

With the confluence of digitization and intelligence revolution, we now have an unprecedented opportunity to unlock population-scale real-world evidence for advancing precision health and democratize high-quality healthcare for EVERYONE. So much remains to be done!

We also want to highlight the Best Papers for the other years dl.acm.org/journal/heal.... Big Congrats!

We are honored and humbled by this great recognition and want to express our sincere appreciation to ACM Health Editor-in-Chief Gang Zhou and the Best Paper Award Committee Co-Chairs Devika Subramanian and Jiayu Zhou for their service to the computational health community.

In 2024, ACM Health started an annual Best Paper Award to recognize the paper with "the most significant contributions and impacts in the field of computing for healthcare", including retrospectively for years 2020-2023.

Given the digital transformation in biomedicine and the emerging prevalence of computational applications, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) established ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare (ACM Health) as the flagship ACM journal for computational health research.

Kudo to co-first authors Yu Gu, Robert Tinn, Hao Cheng for driving the project to a big success, and big congrats to all the co-authors Michael R. Lucas, Naoto Usuyama, Xiaodong Liu, Tristan Naumann, Jianfeng Gao.

PubMedBERT (a.k.a. BiomedBERT) has since become a key building block of our own subsequent explorations, such as BiomedCLIP ai.nejm.org/stoken/defau..., BiomedJourney arxiv.org/abs/2310.10765, BiomedParse www.nature.com/articles/s41....

With amazing collaborators, we're among the first to explore LLM and multimodal GenAI in precision health. PubMedBERT has been cited for 2,000+ times arxiv.org/abs/2007.15779, with over 10MM downloads huggingface.co/microsoft/Bi.... We're psyched to see the interest of the community.

Excited to share that our PubMedBERT paper pioneering exploration of biomedical LLMs has been retrospectively awarded as the Best Paper of the Year by ACM Health: dl.acm.org/journal/heal....

Comprehensive Genomic Profiling leads to better patient outcomes, new joint study says Real-world data from Providence, Illumina and Microsoft Research finds cancer patients with early genomic testing received better precision treatment, underlines urgency to become standard practice

Excited to see promising baby steps, such as molecular tumor board blog.providence.org/national-new... and Azure Health AI Model Catalog techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/aiplatf....

If you will be at SF or Davos, and are passionate about GenAI for RWE and precision health, let's grab a chat :)

A whole-slide foundation model for digital pathology from real-world data - Nature Prov-GigaPath, a whole-slide pathology foundation model pretrained on a large dataset containing around 1.3 billion pathology images, attains state-of-the-art performance in cancer classification and ...

1. Unimodal pretraining (e.g, GigaPath nature.com/articles/s41...);
2. Modality-text alignment with "text as the interlingua" (e.g., LLaVA-Med proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/..., BiomedParse nature.com/articles/s41...);
3. Longitudinal modeling (e.g., by predicting the next medical event).

For non-text modalities such as medical imaging and multi-omics, we can take a modular approach by conducting curriculum learning from three big free lunches:

Can Generalist Foundation Models Outcompete Special-Purpose Tuning? Case Study in Medicine Generalist foundation models such as GPT-4 have displayed surprising capabilities in a wide variety of domains and tasks. Yet, there is a prevalent assumption that they cannot match specialist capabil...

We can piggyback on existing frontier models as the general reasoner, which are already highly competent in understanding and processing biomedical text arxiv.org/abs/2311.16452.

Ofc, this is immensely challenging as patient journeys are multimodal and longitudinal, riddled with noise and missing data. But this is exactly why GenAI is so promising. Underlying GenAI is a generative model, which offers a principal way to tackle uncertainty and missingness.