A new student-founded organization at Penn is partnering with local software company Proscia this spring, with the aim of teaching students about the impact of artificial intelligence on the healthcare industry.
College first-year Akash Verma established the Startup Initiative Foundation this year to provide Penn students with the opportunity to engage with start-ups in Philadelphia. The organization's first partnership, which is set to launch in March, will involve leaders and artificial intelligence developers at Proscia giving talks and demonstrations on campus.
Verma and Wharton first-year Maui Schwartz developed the idea for SIF in December 2022, after their acceptance into Penn. The students said that they shared a desire to connect Penn students with local organizations at the forefront of scientific innovation and research.
“We’re going to be sort of serving as the pipeline to opportunity with these partnerships," Verma said. "If a student is interested in a company, we will connect them and they can take the initiative to obtain an internship."
The alliance with Proscia will mark SIF’s first official partnership. Proscia focuses on the advancement of digital AI pathology via academic research centers, clinical AI partnerships, and data-driven applications. Verma said that he wanted to connect Penn students with the company's "groundbreaking research."
David West, co-founder and CEO of Proscia, said that he developed the idea for the company during his senior year studying bioengineering and biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
“I was just fascinated by this idea that computers can help us understand biology in a much deeper way that humans cannot, and so, we started building,” West said.
Division Chief in Critical Care Medicine Michael Scott serves as advisor of SIF. He worked closely with AI initiatives through Penn Medicine’s telehealth program at the peak of COVID-19 and has continued to promote AI’s critical role in healthcare.
Scott said that he hopes that the partnership will shed light on AI’s potential to advance diagnostic processes within the healthcare industry.
“By using AI, you can see relationships that you otherwise don’t see with the human eye,” he said. “These AI programs can also detect early peritoneal disease in gynecological and urological cancers way before it is present on film.”
SIF is open to students across all departments and majors. Schwartz said that he is specifically invested in exploring AI’s potential impact on business ventures and operations.
“I’m interested in using AI for due diligence in company research,” Schwartz said. “AI applies in the exact same way across all fields at recognizing connections that the human eye is unable to do while looking at a company from a surface level.”
Beyond its collaboration with Proscia, SIF hopes to continue its expansion by partnering with more local startups throughout the city.
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