Bright path ahead for AI and public wellness

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and digital health technologies is revolutionizing global healthcare. These innovative tools present unparalleled opportunities to enhance the efficiency and equity of healthcare systems worldwide. But to achieve these goals, it is necessary to overcome substantial challenges, encompassing technological, ethical, and governance issues, particularly in the context of global disruptions such as the United States' withdrawal from the World Health Organization, geopolitical tensions and a weakening of multilateral collaboration.

Today, AI is becoming increasingly embedded in the entire spectrum of medicine. In research and development, AI is massively accelerating drug discovery and enzyme design by predicting protein structures at pace and scale far surpassing human ability. Tellingly, developers of one of the leading AI solutions for this — Google DeepMind — won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2024 for their unprecedented impact on biological research through AI.

Similarly, AI is helping with clinical trial design and analyzing vast biomedical datasets to uncover novel therapeutic targets. For patients, AI supports diagnostics through imaging analysis, predictive analytics and natural language processing. For example, AI-based retinal scans can detect not only eye disorders such as diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma but also aging disorders such as stroke and Parkinson's disease and heart failure using the same retinal images. AI is already being used in low- and middle-income countries for reading chest X-rays to flag suspected tuberculosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases within seconds.