Generative AI in Life Sciences Industry: Ethics, Applications and Transformations

Christos Makropoulos, Global IT Training & Language Service Lead, AstraZeneca

With more than 20 years’ experience in IT, Christos Makropoulos is a champion of Translation Technology and Translation AI. A translator/linguist by vocation, Christos has helped large organisations, such as AstraZeneca, Ricoh, Oracle, and BMS accelerate growth and promote culture change by enabling multilingual offerings during times of change.

In AstraZeneca, Christos leads a global team that implemented a pioneering architecture of language technology at Enterprise level called AZ Translate. The AZ Language Service translates well over 250M words annually and has onboarded more than 40 internal stakeholders and 20 external Language Service Providers. The solution was designed from the ground up to provide efficiencies and economies of tens of $M annually by centrally managing and reusing global linguistic assets.

Christos is a firm believer in making Translation Technology and translation AI accessible to all users and has been acting as an enabler of easy, intuitive, and streamlined translation process for the enterprise.

Christos speaks 9 living languages, and his academic interests lie in semantic shift, focusing on Koine Greek and Latin paradigms as well as rationalising Business Change in implementing Translation Technology.

Saso Jezernik, Principal Enterprise Architect in Data, Digital and Technology, Takeda

Saso Jezernik has received the Dipl.Ing. degree in Electrical Engineering (M.Sc.E.E.) with specialization in Control Theory and Process Automation from the Technical University of Graz, Austria, in 1996, and a Ph.D. degree in Biomedical Engineering from Aalborg University, Denmark in 1999. Part of the Ph.D. studies was conducted at the Applied Neural Control Laboratory, Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, USA working on active medical implants to treat urinary incontinence. From 1999 until the end of 2002 he was a post-doctoral assistant at the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich co-developing an innovative medical robot/exoskeleton Lokomat. Research group’s 2005 paper about this work was awarded IEEE outstanding paper award in 2010.

In 2006 Saso spent 1 full semester at MIT Sloan School of Management and has completed MIT Sloan Visiting Fellows Program – specializing in technology strategy & innovation management and biomaterials, implants, MEMS & tissue engineering at MIT and Harvard Medical School.

For the past 20 years Saso has been focusing on bringing new technologies and enabling innovation in mechatronics and medical device / combination products (e.g. in active implants, medical injectors, connected inhalers) working for major Pharma and Medtech companies. Lately, his focus has been on digital healthcare, IOT, and Digital Industry 4.0 areas. He is currently Principal Enterprise Architect at Takeda, responsible for the DDT (Data, Digital and Technology) area in Manufacturing, Supply Chain, and Quality. Saso and his team are performing important Business Architecting work at the strategic levels, as well as designing Solution Architectures within Takeda´s Digital Products / Solutions that range from Supply Chain E2E visibility and controls, to condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, digitalization and processing of documents, intelligent automation (IDP, RPA, iBPM, IA technologies), to GenAI based solutions.

Diego Bartolome, Head of Research, ai.now

Diego Bartolome is an expert in machine translation (MT), natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI (GenAI) for life sciences. He oversees the GenAI business unit at TransPerfect, which helps companies to achieve more with GenAI.