By SHANNON O. WELLS
At a recent campus event to announce Pitt’s new Vijayalakshmi Innovation Center in Women’s Health Analytics and Research (VIHAR), Vanathi Gopalakrishnan acknowledged that, to some, the center — a collaborative, artificial intelligence-based global initiative aimed at improving and innovating women’s health care — may sound a bit daunting.
“When I first told my family about VIHAR, someone asked me if it was a new type of yoga,” she said, prompting audience laughter. “I had to explain that, while it might not help with flexibility, it will certainly stretch the boundaries of women’s health research, especially with the expected investments.
“VIHAR’s mission is ambitious, and it has the potentially profound impact to create the world's first comprehensive female digital health twin,” she said, referring to a virtual model used to represent a patient.
Gopalakrishnan, associate professor in Pitt’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, shared her excitement and vision for the initiative during a Dec. 9 announcement ceremony in Alumni Hall’s Connolly Ballroom.
The event also included Vishnu Vardhan and Harsha Vardhini, the siblings whose $10 million pledge, along with expected matching funds from the School of Medicine, will be used to create VIHAR. Vardhan and Vardhini co-founded Vizzhy Inc, a pioneering, Austin, Texas-based company that uses generative AI systems to discover root causes of metabolic diseases and develop personalized guidance for chronic illness management.
As Gopalakrishnan explained, VIHAR will allow researchers — working with a global network of collaborators — to simulate models and optimize strategies for preventing and treating illnesses uniquely affecting girls and women.
Based in the School of Medicine’s Department of Biomedical Informatics, the center will build on progress made by the school’s Pattern Recognition from Biomedical Evidence (PRoBE) laboratory, which Gopalakrishnan founded. She will serve as founding director of VIHAR
“VIHAR will model the health trajectories of women and girls across every stage of life, capturing the richness of diverse ethnicities, environments, cultural and social contexts,” she said. “This will elevate precision medicine to new inclusive heights.”
Global AI center
Vardhan and Vardhini named VIHAR after their mother, Vijaya Lakshmi, who struggled with diabetes and a difficult experience when Vardhini was born. The siblings, their families and their mother visited Pittsburgh in early December to announce the new initiative and connect with Pitt community members.
Anantha Shekhar, senior vice chancellor for health sciences, said the announcement marks the beginning of a “great adventure” in creating the next level of AI-driven technologies for health sciences and a transformation of healthcare, of which “we believe Pitt is a leader in the country.”
“We want to begin with the launch (of a) global innovation center to reduce health disparities in women and improve the healthcare for women across the globe,” he said.
Shekhar lauded Vardhan and Vardhini for their work in creating Chat GPT-like generative, large-language modeling systems for “almost all of the Asian languages, and Mandarin.”
“VIHAR is really the first global AI center,” he added, “and it’s already been in some extraordinary part under the leadership of (Gopalakrishnan), one of our faculty who has been, in fact, working with many large data sets from the World Health Organization and other global data sets looking at women’s health disparities and women’s health challenges.”
Chancellor Joan Gabel, who welcomed those gathered to this “very exciting and transformative announcement,” expressed “our profound appreciation and gratitude to Vishnu Vardhan and Harsha Vardhini for this generous gift.
“This is a very specific type of generosity that’s really going to make an incredible difference for countless women and girls to live healthier and happier lives and close gaps that should never exist in the first place,” she said.
Gabel described the center as an “intersection” of health, data science and generative AI that’s “uniquely possible” at the University while fulfilling multiple pillars of the strategic Plan for Pitt.
“It’s an example of the kinds of investment in people, in places, that are happening that can make Pittsburgh and the University of Pittsburgh vibrant and future-ready in service right here, nationally and internationally,” she said, adding that the center represents the “pursuit of ideas and discovery and synergies that really mean something when we talk about what it is to be the life-sciences century and to be at the epicenter of health sciences and AI and technology.”
Trauma inspires opportunity
Vishnu Vardhan said it was his mother’s struggle with childbirth that fueled his and his sister’s goals for women’s health innovation.
“Because I know the struggle she has faced when my sister was born,” he said, referring to the trauma his mother experienced while giving birth to his sister Harsha at a hospital in India. “She had hepatitis, an infection, which is a very simple, cellular (form of) hepatitis. But because she was in third trimester, she really (faced) a huge problem.”
His mother’s recovery included three months in an intensive-care unit.
“Women and girls from Pittsburgh to my hometown in India suffer from a lack of understanding about the issues that uniquely affect their health and wellness,” Vardhan shared in an earlier statement. “My sister and I believe our gift will accelerate the process of eliminating those disparities and lead to an improved quality of life for women and the people who love them.”
Learning about Pitt’s research climate and facilities during visits in the past year or two, Vardhan was impressed with what he encountered.
“I really liked the vision and what they were doing,” he said of Shekhar’s and his colleagues’ approach to integrating AI and healthcare. “The infrastructure and vision are what brought us here.”
Vanathi Gopalakrishnan called the opportunities for VIHAR in the coming years “limitless.”
“And we predict that over the next two decades, we’ll have accumulated and analyzed enough data to have created at least one comprehensive female digital-health twin,” she said, with VIHAR “unlocking the potential to conduct studies and trials on a scale never before imagined.
“We won’t just monitor and measure — we’ll transform,” she added. “We’ll be able to clearly track how women’s biological health and overall well-being improve worldwide.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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