BioML Seminar 4.3 - Advancing Science and Medicine with Collaborative AI agents
[IN PERSON EVENT IN BERKELEY]
Join us for a new seminar from the BioML group in Machine Learning at Berkeley, sponsored by Amplify Partners. This week, we're excited to host Vivek Natarajan, Research Scientist at Google DeepMind !
Talk Abstract:
This talk introduces general-purpose AI systems from Google DeepMind designed to accelerate scientific discovery and democratize medical expertise. First, the AI co-scientist, a multi-agent Gemini-based system, assists researchers by systematically generating and refining novel hypotheses for complex scientific challenges.
This approach has yielded promising, lab-validated results, including identifying drugs for repurposing against acute myeloid leukemia, discovering new therapeutic targets for liver fibrosis (Advanced Science), and recapitulating a novel gene transfer mechanism for bacterial resistance (Cell). While early, the co-scientist represents a promising step toward a true collaborative AI partner for scientist.
Secondly, the AI co-physician, AMIE, aims to give doctors superpowers and make medical expertise universally accessible. In simulated settings, AMIE outperformed primary care physicians across multiple clinical evaluation axes (Nature) and is showing promise as an assistive tool in ongoing real-world validations (Nature). Together, these initiatives demonstrate AI's potential to transform scientific research and care delivery.
Speaker Bio:
Vivek Natarajan is a Research Scientist at Google DeepMind leading research at the intersection of AI, science
and medicine. He is the lead researcher behind Med-PaLM (Nature, 2023) and Med-PaLM 2 (Nature Medicine, 2025), the first AI systems to obtain passing and expert level scores on US Medical License exam questions, respectively.
Vivek also co-leads Project AMIE, a research program aiming to build and democratize medical superintelligence. Over the past year, AMIE has shown promising potential in controlled settings, including primary care, specialty care, and complex diagnostic challenges, as both a standalone (Nature, 2025) and assistive tool for clinicians (Nature 2025). Finally, Vivek recently co-led the development of the AI co-scientist - a virtual AI collaborator designed to augment scientists, help uncover new original knowledge and accelerate the clock speed of scientific discoveries. Prior to Google, Vivek worked on multimodal assistant systems at Facebook AI Research. He is also part of the faculty for executive education at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in a part-time capacity.