By Ritu Jha-
Entrepreneurs and Professionals in Partnership for Innovation in Healthcare (EPPIC) recently hosted a conference titled “Safeguarding AI in BioPharma: Privacy and Principles in Practice”, drawing healthcare professionals from India and across the United States to discuss AI ethics, privacy, and regulatory safeguards in the biopharmaceutical sector.
“We are hearing a lot about artificial intelligence applications in healthcare,” said Hiranjith H, president of EPPIC Global, during the event’s session on Risk Governance and Ethics in AI. “The topic was about how we manage risk, govern the AI in healthcare, and how to de-risk from a business perspective when you’re building a healthcare technology product.”
“This topic brought together good speakers with expertise in this area of risk governance for ethics in AI,” he added. “And that’s the whole objective of EPPIC Global – to bring together experts and discuss it so that we create awareness, educate the audience about the most relevant trends in healthcare practice.”
The event marked EPPIC’s fifth gathering this year. Its annual flagship conference is scheduled for Oct. 11, a full-day event focusing on biopharma devices and diagnostics, digital health, and AI.
Ganesh Keerthivasan[Above photo], CEO of ZealStrat, spoke about his firm’s emerging focus on ethical artificial intelligence. “Recently, we started an ethical AI practice,” he said. “From 2019, I started thinking about AI and ethics, and the safety of AI. When I was a chief strategy officer for a company called Redflag AI, I realized the potential of AI.”
“I was very interested in getting into this space because our company is thinking about the future, sustainability, and humanity. We need to make sure our world is safe,” Keerthivasan told indica.
ZealStrat, a 10-year-old management consulting firm, works with healthcare, financial services, HR companies, and governments.
“They are all interested in this,” Keerthivasan said. “For ethical AI practices, we are collaborators with IEEE. They have a framework for AI ethics, have trained a lot of people on it, and they have partnered with ZealStrat to test AI. We can assess the AI and certify it, also determining whether it is good or bad, or if any aspects are not bad, such as identifying areas that need improvement.”
“We can then provide guidance on what to fix and assist them in making the necessary corrections,” he said. “For instance, in a hospital system using a chatbot to reduce customer interactions or customer engagement, they need to be careful about it because that chatbot, if it is driven by AI, they need to make sure that the chatbot is safe and ethical. For that, we carry out an initial assessment and help them create an AI policy for their company.”
“We have created a Risk and Ethics Supervising Agent (RESA),” Keerthivasan added. “It’s our proprietary product, and it’s a small, lightweight model. It can run on any small computer. It just sits outside the AI and monitors whenever an output is generated.”
Joice John[Above photo], product management lead at Skyflow in Palo Alto, discussed real-world use cases and risks of AI in the pharmaceutical industry.
“We are not in the experimentation phase anymore,” John said. “We are seeing real-world applications across research and supply chain logistics. AI models are essentially helping predict bottlenecks in drug shortages.”
“It’s also getting to direct patient-related applications that focus on ongoing treatments. It’s no longer hype; it’s in logistics and has become a strategic layer for the pharma operating system across the entire value chain,” she said. “We’ve seen a sea change in its adoption; 80% of life science professionals are already using AI, and it’s becoming a core competency. Growing investments reflect that shift.”
“Pharma investment is predicted to go from $3 billion to $18 billion by 2029. That represents a 5,500% increase,” John added. “We see 95 percent of pharma companies investing, and the return on investment is staggering. AI is already delivering about 70% cost savings per clinical trial, and in some cases by about 80%.”
Kolli Sarath, CEO of Boltzmann Labs in Bengaluru, India, traveled to the United States to attend the conference and shared insights into his company’s international expansion efforts.
“I came to the U.S. for the conference,” Sarath told indica. “For the last month, I have been traveling around the U.S. trying to understand the biotech ecosystem here. Trying to push our platforms, whatever we have built, into the ecosystem here.”
“We have created a platform that will accelerate small and large molecule discoveries,” he said. “At the same time, it will be helping in the process of Indian manufacturing. Our platform is ready, and it is being adopted by different academic labs and biotech companies in India.”
“In the U.S., we have collaborations with some universities, like the University of Maryland,” Sarath continued. “We are collaborating on different projects with these universities. But we are now trying to get a foothold in the biotech industry and ecosystem here.”
“In the U.S., even the small biotechs are big companies,” he said. “We are hoping to help these companies with the means of adopting biotech in their processes. We are building on the U.S.-India connection, especially in the R&D space. In the AI space, India has wonderful talent. We are exploring options to leverage that in the biopharma ecosystem. That is a key area of focus for us.”
On challenges faced in India, Sarath acknowledged the growing but still maturing infrastructure.
“Compared to the U.S., the R&D ecosystem in India is comparatively less equipped,” he said. “But the system is now rapidly growing in India with some government support. But still, the R&D ecosystem in India has some challenges.”
“The R&D in the biopharma sector of the U.S. is far more advanced,” Sarath added. “That’s where we hope to have the right collaborations in this industry, so that will help us to grow in India.”
EPPIC’s conference offered a cross-continental dialogue on ethical AI use, risk governance, and global collaborations, signaling a broader movement to ensure that innovation in healthcare remains both secure and sustainable.
