Elkin to Assume ACTS Board of Directors Role in April

By Dirk Hoffman

His three-year term as a director-at-large will commence April 5 at the conclusion of Translational Science 24, the annual meeting of ACTS April 3-5 in Las Vegas, Nevada, where Elkin will be a presenter at two talks.

ACTS was founded in 2009 to support the needs of the Clinical and Translational Science Awards (CTSA) program. ACTS currently represents nearly 5,000 members who are involved in academic institutions, industry, philanthropic agencies and government. 

The University at Buffalo first received a CTSA award from the National Institutes of Health of $15 million in 2015 to speed the delivery of new drugs, diagnostics and medical devices to patients.

UB’s CTSA award was renewed for another five years in 2020 for $21.7 million through the NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS).

“Peter Elkin’s election to the board of directors of the Association for Clinical and Translational Science underscores his pivotal role in leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) for advancing translational science,” says Allison Brashear, MD, MBA, UB’s vice president for health sciences and dean of the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences.

“Representing UB in this national capacity, Dr. Elkin’s expertise in informatics and data science, particularly in harnessing the power of AI, promises groundbreaking insights into health care research,” she adds. “We trust his leadership will pave the way for transformative advancements at the intersection of AI and translational science.”

Elkin notes the ACTS board position is a natural step in the growth of his career and says “I am honored to be representing UB in such an important and visible role nationally.”

“I have been active in ACTS and the CTSA consortium where I have co-chaired the NCATS Informatics Enterprise Committee for the last two years and have also co-chaired the NCATS Quality Committee,” he adds. “I have been on the program committee for the annual ACTS meeting for the last three years and have been a consistent speaker at the event.”

Earlier this year, Elkin was also named to two new positions:

• as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Translational Research, an open access journal that publishes translational research on improving clinical medicine and human health, including research in basic science methods and clinical trial study designs
• and as a member of the Food and Drug Administration’s Digital Health Advisory Committee, which advises the FDA commissioner on issues related to digital health technologies (DHTs), providing relevant expertise and perspective to improve the FDA’s understanding of the benefits, risks and clinical outcomes associated with the use of DHTs

At the TS24 meeting, Elkin will be the primary presenter of a panel discussion titled “The Value of Informatics and Data Science to Translational Science and Translational Research.”

The panel will discuss the ways that informatics can support translational science and translational research. Areas of interest will be the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Large Language Models in research.

Other topics to be discussed include how informatics can facilitate distributed clinical trials, and particularly those that use real world evidence. The panelists will discuss data-driven recruitment to clinical trials and the potential for machine learning models to help with recruitment of underrepresented in medicine subjects to clinical trials.

Elkin will also be a co-presenter in a panel discussion titled “Generative AI as a Tool for Advancing Translational Science: Opportunities and Potential Pitfalls.”

Over the last year, advances in generative AI technologies for image or language generation, such as DALL·E and ChatGPT, have garnered wide interest from the scientific community and the public at large.

However, the areas in which generative AI can be most useful in advancing translational science by being integrated into research institutions are not well understood.

The session will be composed of a cross-institutional panel of experts, with the goal of producing an informative and forward-thinking discussion of how generative AI technologies may be used in the future of translational science.