Democratising and Unlocking Biomedical Insights with a Biology Foundation Model

Bioinformatics Journal Club: Unlocking Biomedical Insights with Foundation Models & LLMs

Join us for our next session as we delve into the cutting-edge landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs) developed specifically for biomedical research! This promises to be a complex yet incredibly insightful topic, and we might break it down into two sessions to cover it comprehensively.

Our discussion will kick off with the paper: "Foundational models for the biomedical sciences" by James Zou, Yiqun Chen, Michael P. Snyder et al. (Available at: `https://biomni.stanford.edu/paper.pdf`)

This paper provides an overview of the growing field of foundation models in biomedicine, which includes the exciting development of LLMs designed to accelerate discovery in life sciences. Initiatives like BioMNI, with the involvement of partners like Genentech, are at the forefront of building these powerful tools.

We'll explore:

• What makes these LLMs "cutting-edge" for biomedical applications?
• How can they integrate vast amounts of biomedical text and data?
• What are the implications for drug discovery, disease understanding, and clinical insights?

As always, this will be an informal and engaging get-together. I will prepare a brief presentation to guide our discussion. We're excited to learn and chat about where LLMs are taking biomedical research!