Healthcare AI News 1/29/25

News

China-based AI startup DeepSeek introduces a low-cost, open-source AI model that rivals leading US technologies, sending US tech stocks sharply down. DeepSeek, which is free to use and can be run locally on modest hardware, has prompted discussions about US technology export controls, the contrast in cost in AI development and training. DeepSeek was launched in July 2023 by a billionaire hedge fund operator who previously worked with using AI in investing. He stockpiled some lower-power Nvidia chips which were eventually banned from US export to China.

Meanwhile, Chinese technology company Alibaba releases a new version of its own LLM that it says outperforms DeepSeek-V3 and ChatGPT-4o.

OpenAI launches a research preview of Operator, an AI agent that can analyze a webpage and interact with it to perform tasks that involve typing, clicking, and scrolling.

A Health Affairs commentary piece – published as part of the National Academy of Medicine’s Vital Directions for Health and Health Care: Priorities for 2025 initiative — calls for the incoming administration to focus on four health AI-related priorities:

• Ensure safe, effective, and trustworthy AI use.
• Develop an AI-competent workforce.
• Invest in AI research to support the science, practice, and delivery of health and healthcare.
• Promote policies and procedures to clarify AI liability and responsibilities.

New Vatican ethical guidelines call for using AI in healthcare to enhance, rather than replace, the relationship between provider and patient.

Stat reports that the White House has indefinitely cancelled meetings of the Health Information Technology Advisory Committee and its workgroups, which operate under HHS’s ASTP/ONC. The committee, which was established under the 21st Century Cures Act,  makes recommendations to ASTP on a variety of technology issues, including AI and interoperability.

Mayo Clinic President and CEO Gianrico Farrugia, MD tells the World Economic Forum that his organization has access to 320 algorithms, but their biggest challenge is that today’s technology that can’t support the tools. He says that he would not want to receive specialty care without the clinician using AI, which will require a new architecture to deliver at scale. The panel discussion was titled “Healthcare Innovation at Davos 2025: Cracking the Code of Digital Health.” The panel’s key points involved interoperability, platform-based models, health worker AI training, data liquidity and sharing, and building trust.

Also at the World Economic Forum, the CEO of AI company Anthropic predicts that AI could double human lifespan within five to 10 years. A skeptical response might be:

• Attaining that goal would require the US lifespan to increase to 155 years almost immediately.
• Even AI-enhanced drug research is unlikely to make a difference of that magnitude given the need to conduct clinical trials, earn FDA approval, and figure out the economics that would be required to make a solution universally available.
• Raising the average lifespan would require applying the principles to nearly every American, which has never happened.
• His statement is more aspirational than based on biology and medical research. 
• He also says that AI systems will outperform humans in nearly everything by 2026 or 2027.
• His company sells AI.

Spain-based AI medical imaging company Quibim raises $50 million in a Series A funding round. The company hopes to use AI to extract information from medical imaging to identify phenotypes that can predict outcomes, an advanced imaging field known as radiomics. 

AI startup Retro Biosciences is reportedly raising a $1 billion funding round. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman provided the company’s initial funding of $180 million and will participate in the latest round. The company’s goal is to  add 10 years to the healthy human lifespan by using AI to target and reengineer the cellular drivers of aging.

US Rep.David Schweikert (R-AZ) introduces a bill that would allow FDA-approved AI tools to qualify as a medical practitioner, including the ability to prescribe drugs.

Business

Paragon Health IT will divest its consulting business, change the parent company’s name to Strings, and refocus on AI-driven healthcare workload management system.

AI-powered cancer drug discovery startup Manas AI launches with a $25 million seed funding round. The co-founders are LinkedIn co-founder and venture capitalist Reid Hoffman and oncologist and Pulitzer-winning author Siddhartha Mukherjee, DPhil, MD,

Equality AI CEO Maia Hightower, MD, MPH, MBA announces that the company, which focused on trustworthy AI in healthcare, has closed after four years following the White House’s rollback of a previous executive order that called for trustworthy AI development.

Research

Researchers in Scotland are developing AI software that can scan someone’s retina to detect early signs of dementia, which could be used during routine eye exams. The team explains, “The retina holds a whole wealth of information and is a biological barometer of our brain health … Something very simple like a photograph of a retina can now be harnessed to potentially predict brain change later on in life.” They hope to roll the technology out to opticians in 2026.

Other

A Twitter user finds a  DeepSeek-generated dataset of 143,000 made-up encounter conversations on the Hugging Face AI website. Each item contains the disease, language, scenario, patient-provider conversation, common errors in diagnosis, differential diagnoses, related diseases, and a summary, all in multiple languages. It was developed for AI training and can be licensed from MIT. Leading the project is endocrinologist Johnson Thomas, MD.

Contacts

Mr. H, Lorre, Jenn, Dr. Jayne.
Get HIStalk updates.
Send news or rumors.
Follow on X, Bluesky, and LinkedIn.
Contact us.