News Center

Hundreds gathered for VCU Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center’s 2025 Gordon Ginder Innovations in Cancer Symposium at the Dewey Gottwald Center in Richmond on April 3. This year’s conference was focused on artificial intelligence (AI) and data science, exploring how this new frontier can benefit oncology care.

Robert A. Winn, M.D., director and Lipman Chair in Oncology at Massey, addressed the audience, remarking that advancements in AI and data science will have a significant impact on cancer research and patient outcomes, but noted they will always be driven by the wisdom of scientists.

“While we are talking about AI as a revolutionary tool, we have to understand the concept that there is no artificial wisdom,” Winn said. “Our scientific wisdom will continue to drive us on the back end of everything we do. Wisdom emphasizes sound judgment, experiences and the ability to apply knowledge effectively in complex situations.”

Dr. Robert Winn, Massey Comprehensive Cancer Center director, speaking at the 2025 Gordon Ginder Symposium.

The annual symposium brought together nationally recognized leaders from around the country to share their expertise and insights.

Hoifung Poon, Ph.D., general manager of Microsoft Health Futures, discussed the concept of advancing health at the speed of AI, harnessing complex models to inform real-world data, create a path toward generative diagnostics and “master the language of a patient.” “We have a really exciting opportunity to figure out how to make sense of all of this medical data…and how to make yesterday’s impossible into tomorrow's plausible,” Poon said.

Maia Hightower, M.D., M.P.H., CEO and founder of Veritas Healthcare Insights, LLC, shared the need to responsibly integrate AI while ensuring that governance is accessible within health care systems.

“While AI offers great potential in health care, these challenges must be addressed thoughtfully to ensure ethical and effective use of the technology,” Hightower said.

Kevin Byrd, D.D.S., Ph.D., associate research member at Massey and assistant professor of oral and craniofacial molecular biology at the VCU School of Dentistry’s Philips Institute for Oral Health Research, presented on the possibilities of using AI to virtually map every cell in the human body and develop a living atlas of medicine.

“We are moving beyond healthy single-cell atlases to disease-centric, spatially resolved references that inform diagnostics, therapeutics and precision medicine,” Byrd said. “The convergence of AI with large scale multi-modal data enables virtual cells and predictive models that simulate human biology at multiple scales, driving discovery and clinical impact.”

Wei Zhou, Ph.D., associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Virginia Tech, spoke on building hybrid nano-bio systems to provide real-time bioinformation. By developing a flexible bio-mesh nano-bio interface for cell networks, Zhou is working toward a future in which humans can obtain wearable or implantable medical devices.

“We are getting closer to a world where we can place nanostructures into the body to monitor, in real-time, potential cancer markers to even better ensure early detection,” Zhou said.

Maryellen Giger, Ph.D., vice chair of radiology at the University of Chicago, explained how the evolution and advancement in AI over the last 40 years has improved medical imaging for many diseases, including breast, ovarian and thyroid cancers, among many others. She highlighted how the implementation of a national medical imaging data reliability tool is creating an open, curated and extensive image data resource that can be used by the public to enhance the understanding of science and practice of medicine.

“I think this is the way of the future, to level the playing field so that everyone has access to images developed by AI,” Giger said.

Lawrence Shulman, M.D., director of the Center for Global Cancer Medicine at the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania, discussed how the challenges facing medicine today are similar across the globe—from the United States to Rwanda—in finding ways to safely, effectively and sustainably deliver high-quality, reliable care in the context of sub-optimal health care infrastructures, limited human capacities and patient poverty.

“The partnership between clinicians, doctors, hospitals, health care networks and the AI community has to be a team-based approach if we’re going to succeed,” Shulman said.

Following the symposium’s individual presentations, Guleer Shahab, M.P.H., a Ph.D. candidate at Massey and the VCU Department of Health Policy, moderated a panel conversation with all of the event speakers on the future directions of how to effectively use AI and data science to improve cancer science and patient outcomes.

The symposium is named in honor of Gordon D. Ginder, M.D., who held the Lipman Chair in Oncology and served as director at Massey from 1997 to 2019. As one of the longest-standing NCI-designated cancer center directors, Ginder left a lasting legacy that has impacted countless lives within and beyond the Massey community. Ginder continues to contribute to research, patient care and education at Massey, where his laboratory focuses on epigenetics and regulation of genes in cancer and blood diseases.

Ginder closed the symposium, reminding the audience of the need to “use natural intelligence to guide and shape how AI is used, not just in cancer treatment, but across medicine and in life.”

Written by: Blake Belden, Bill Potter