AI Health
Friday Roundup
The AI Health Friday Roundup highlights the week’s news and publications related to artificial intelligence, data science, public health, and clinical research.
October 17, 2025
In this week’s Duke AI Health Friday Roundup: too much emphasis on chatbots?; new pathway for pain relief; state of play in medical AI; cuts at CDC hit NHANES, ethics review; bioinformatics expertise still relevant in AI age; promising work on cancer vaccines; waiting for shoe to drop on NIH APC policy; building better AI models for chemistry; measles outbreak prompts quarantine in South Carolina schools; much more:
AI, STATISTICS & DATA SCIENCE
- “A major challenge in evaluation [of medical AI] is that a tool’s effects are highly dependent on the human-computer interface, user training, and setting in which the tool is used. Numerous efforts lay out standards for the responsible use of AI, but most focus on monitoring for safety (eg, detection of model hallucinations) or institutional compliance with various process measures, and do not address effectiveness (ie, demonstration of improved outcomes).” In a special report published in JAMA, Angus and colleagues provide a summary of a recent JAMA-sponsored summit meeting around the current state of play in AI for medicine.
- “The AI provides the answers I need, sometimes exceeding my expectations. So, what is my role in this process?…I found out during a study of lung cancer….I realized that my role had shifted from scripting to supervising. What matters now is stating the question clearly, spotting problems that the computer cannot see and taking responsibility for the answer.” In an article for Nature, researcher Lei Zhu describes how the advent of agentic AI did not make his bioinformatics expertise redundant, but merely shifted the point where its leverage makes a difference.
- “Right now, it feels as if Big Tech is throwing general-purpose A.I. spaghetti at the wall and hoping that nothing truly terrible sticks. As the A.I. pioneer Yoshua Bengio has recently emphasized, advancing generalized A.I. systems that can exhibit greater autonomy isn’t necessarily aligned with human interests. Humanity would be better served by labs devoting more resources on building specialized tools for science, medicine, technology and education.” In an editorial for the New York Times, Gary Marcus makes a case for a different emphasis in AI development.
- “A key focus is on the challenges these methods face before they become truly predictive, particularly in predicting emergent chemical phenomena. We believe that the ultimate goal of a simulation method or theory is to predict phenomena not seen before and that generative AI should be subject to these same standards before it is deemed useful for chemistry. We suggest that to overcome these challenges, future AI models need to integrate core chemical principles, especially from statistical mechanics.” A perspective article published by Tiwary and colleagues in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examines the potential roles that various kinds of generative AI could play in discovery science in chemistry.
BASIC SCIENCE, CLINICAL RESEARCH & PUBLIC HEALTH
- “Recent evidence has highlighted the dual and opposing roles of NSAIDs. Although NSAIDs provide immediate relief from inflammatory pain, they substantially delay its resolution…we were able to reproduce the delayed and insufficient recovery of allodynia provoked by diclofenac in the CFA model of inflammatory pain. More importantly, we found that an EP2 antagonist and selective silencing of EP2 and one of its downstream intracellular signaling mechanisms in SCs provided complete and sustained attenuation of inflammatory allodynia.” A research article published by Nassini and colleagues in Nature Communications describes the discovery (in a mouse model) of a new druggable target for analgesia that may offer advantages over NSAIDs.
- “Put succinctly, this is some of the most promising cancer-vaccine work that I think we’ve ever seen. I have to emphasize that this is far from the first time that people have tried to take advantage of such pathways (STING, TLR4, etc.) or of technologies like mRNA or nanoparticles for oncology vaccines, but if you keep pounding on these doors sometimes they open.” At In the Pipeline, Derek Lowe examines some recent progress in the arena of vaccines for cancer.
- “Across those two schools, at least 153 unvaccinated children were exposed to the virus and have been put in a 21-day quarantine, during which they are barred from attending school, state officials said in a press conference. Twenty-one days is the maximum incubation period, spanning from when a person is exposed to when they would develop a rash if infected.” Ars Technica’s Beth Mole reports on the introduction of quarantine measures to stop the spread of measles among schoolchildren in a South Carolina district.
- “In this large cohort of U.S. veterans, receipt of the 2024–2025 Covid-19 vaccine was associated with decreased risks of Covid-19–associated emergency department visits, hospitalizations, and deaths during 6 months of follow-up. The Covid-19 vaccine was associated with an estimated vaccine effectiveness ranging from 29% against emergency department visits to 39% against hospitalization and 64% against death, findings that closely mirror the immunologic gradient observed in trials and mechanistic studies.” A research article published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Cai and colleagues presents findings from a study of health outcomes among US veterans who received updated booster vaccinations for COVID.
COMMUNICATIONS & Policy
- “Journals that are free to read, or open access, usually charge authors a fee, known as an article processing charge (APC), to publish in them.…But many argue that some forms of open-access publishing have spurred some for-profit publishers to churn out as many papers as possible to generate revenue through APCs. Moreover, recent data suggest that APCs of fully open-access journals increased by an average of 6.5% in the past year, pricing out researchers in less-resourceful settings and introducing more inequity in research.” In an article for Chemical and Engineering News, Dalmeet Chawla Singh reports on an impending decision for the NIH regarding policies related to support for publication costs for government-funded research.
- “The entire staff of the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), a highly respected epidemiology journal, were terminated and then reinstated. So were employees working on global health and suicide prevention, as well as “disease detectives” and staff at the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases….Staff with the CDC’s institutional review board, which reviews the design of studies, and the ethics office, which oversees all conflicts and interests for CDC leaders and advisory committee members, were also let go.” The Guardian’s Melody Schreiber reports on recent layoffs (and in some cases, rapid reinstatements) of personnel at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
- “Deloitte Australia will issue a partial refund to the federal government after admitting that artificial intelligence had been used in the creation of a $440,000 report littered with errors including three nonexistent academic references and a made-up quote from a Federal Court judgement…A new version of the report for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations (DEWR) was quietly uploaded to the department’s website on Friday…It features more than a dozen deletions of nonexistent references and footnotes…” At Financial Review, Edmund Tadros and Paul Karp report that the Australian division of consulting company Deloitte apparently used AI-hallucinated references in a government commissioned report H/T @Retraction Watch).
- “The CDC division within the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) that directs the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) — a bellwether of the country’s health — lost all its planners in last weekend’s firings. Unlike the 600 out of 1,300 employees eliminated across disciplines but reinstated within 24 hours, the people in the branch that plans and disseminates the research informing public health policies from food to oral health to environmental exposures got no reprieve.” STAT News’ Elizabeth Cooney reports that many of the CDC staff and contractors responsible for administering the venerable NHANES national survey of diet and health among Americans have been laid off this week.
