A behind-the-scenes look at the 2025 Breakthrough West agenda

BREAKTHROUGH WEST | SF & VIRTUAL

A behind-the-scenes look at this year's agenda

Dear readers:

You come to STAT for tough, smart journalism that helps you think about big topics like how AI will change medicine and the upheaval enveloping U.S. science.

So join us in San Francisco on May 14, when we'll do it live.

Those particular big topics will be our targets. We're still finalizing planning for the summit but already we expect fantastic conversations. I will start the day with a virtual interview with Robert Califf, the former FDA commissioner, who will answer my questions and yours about the future of an agency that touches a quarter of the U.S. economy.

Later in the day, we'll talk to Georges Benjamin, one of the nation's most influential physician leaders, and Susan Desmond-Hellmann, who has served in senior leadership roles at Genentech, UCSF, and The Gates Foundation, about the challenges facing science and industry.

View the agenda

We'll also have a smorgasbord of AI issues to turn our attention to, from a demo of how technology can track how people move through space to an all-star discussion of AI in cancer care. Brittany Trang, the author of our new AI newsletter, AI Prognosis, will show you how the barriers to the technology's adoption are not what you think: Leaders from top health systems will explain how major players are ignoring legal issues that can prevent innovation from being adopted.

Other speakers will include Reed Jobs, who is conducting his own war on cancer, and Karen Knudsen, the new CEO of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.

And we'll revisit one of STAT's many journalistic triumphs. Casey Ross and Bob Herman were named finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for coverage that, in the words of the judges, exposed how an insurer "used an unregulated algorithm to override clinicians' judgments and deny care, highlighting the dangers of AI use in medicine." Ross will bring key sources from that story on stage for a look at what has changed — and what hasn't — since the publication of that project.

It will be a day of real-time journalism that will help shape attendees' understanding of our quickly changing world.

I can't wait to see you there.