Christopher Ward — Chair Ward is thanked for convening the hearing and is addressed as the chair.
Christopher Ward — Addressed as Chair Ward by the witness.
Christopher Ward — Referenced in a comment about biology becoming an engineering discipline.
Christopher Ward — Referenced in discussion of California's biotech and innovation economy.
Christopher Ward — Called on to advance slides during the presentation; likely Assemblymember Lisa Calderon or another Lisa, but the transcript only says 'Lisa'.
Christopher Ward — Addressed directly as the chair while the speaker asks to make a quick comment and endorses the point.
Christopher Ward — Addressed as Chair Ward.
Christopher Ward — Referenced as Chair Ward in the discussion of testing and validation.
Rebecca Bauer-Kahan — Chair Rebecca Bauer-Kahan opens the discussion with brief remarks and thanks Chair Ward and the panelists, then later is referenced again as the chair as the discussion returns to her.
Rebecca Bauer-Kahan — Addressed as Chair Bauer-Kahan by the witness.
Dr. Ida Sim — Dr. Ida Sim, a UCSF professor and co-chair in computational precision health, introduced her work at the intersection of AI, digital health, and medicine. She argued that health care must extend beyond the clinic into daily life, especially for chronic disease management, and described how smartphones, sensors, and AI can support patients between visits. She outlined three research areas in her lab: sensors, making sense of data, and connecting care between the edge and traditional health systems. As examples, she discussed remote blood pressure monitoring, the challenge of integrating patient-generated data into electronic health records, and AI tools that turn large health datasets into actionable insights, including ECG-based risk prediction. She also emphasized interoperability across systems and apps, and concluded by describing Jupyter Health as an effort to connect siloed health solutions and bring the power of Jupyter-style scientific computing into health care.
Dr. Karen Knudson — Introduced as the chief executive officer for Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy.
Dr. Shanker Sundaram — Introduced as Deputy Principal Associate Director for Mission and Engineering and Director of the Bioreactor at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
Karen Knudson — Karen Knudson, CEO of the Parker Institute, says she agrees with the prior remarks and is a strong believer in wearables. She then shifts into a focused point that cancer is an important use case for AI and wearable technology, indicating how these tools could be applied in that context.
Dr. Goodson — Called on by the chair to speak next; likely a witness or panelist.
Dr. Sundaram / Shankar Sundaram — Introduced the next witness and began his remarks.
Shankar Sundaram — Identified himself and described his background in biosecurity, computing, and national security.
unnamed witness — Said that recorded audio and first-draft outputs from proprietary AI systems are not publicly available, making independent accuracy checks nearly impossible.
Josh Lowenthal — Welcomed as a colleague and invited to ask questions for the panel.
Dr. Weber Gupta — Introduced as CEO of Pangea Data and first panelist for panel two.
Jenny Hu — Introduced as senior director for regulatory affairs at Dexcom.
Dr. Danjima Quarles — Introduced as senior director of AI innovation at Lilly Ventures and Eli Lilly.
Dr. James Diggin — Introduced as vice president for policy and biosecurity at Twist Biosciences.
Dr. Vibhur Gupta — Dr. Vibhur Gupta introduces himself as the founder of Pangea Data and explains that the company focuses on using patient records and other health data to identify care gaps that are hard to catch in short clinical visits. He argues that these gaps lead to preventable disease, higher costs, and broader economic burden, and notes that the problem is especially important as more patients may lose payer coverage. He references related efforts such as imaging and genetic testing for earlier disease detection, then describes Pangea’s approach: integrating EHRs, lab systems, and PACS to surface actionable intelligence at the point of care and for population health. Gupta says that large language models alone are not sufficient for clinical decision-making because the work requires temporal analysis, interpretation of lab values, and handling ambiguous clinical language. Instead, Pangea breaks clinical reasoning into modular components, which he says improves accuracy, repeatability, and trustworthiness. He adds that the approach has been deployed across multiple disease areas, validated in peer-reviewed work, and shown to generate savings and value through better outcomes and time savings. Finally, he notes that adoption is easier in large health systems than in rural settings, where EHR access, compute resources, and reimbursement are more limited, and says grants and reimbursement models should ultimately be tied to patient outcomes.
Chris Ward — Thanked for the opportunity to testify.
Chris Ward — Chair Ward is repeatedly addressed throughout this segment as the discussion moves through related policy and implementation issues, including clinical decision-making, transparency in training data, repeatability, value creation, patient access, reimbursement, and the need for legislative and technical solutions to improve access to technology. The exchange then transitions into closing remarks and the handoff to the next panel, ending with Dr. Magnus thanking Chairman Ward for the invitation to testify.
Chris Ward — Addressed as Chair Ward by the witness.
Rebecca Bauer-Kahan — Thanked for extending the opportunity to share testimony.
Rebecca Bauer-Kahan — Addressed as Chair Bauer-Kahan.
Rebecca Bauer-Kahan — Referenced as Chair Bauer-Kahan in the discussion of testing and validation.
Rebecca Bauer-Kahan — Addressed as Chair Bauer by the witness.
Pangea Data — Described as a company focused on closing care gaps.
Ginny Hu — Introduced herself as Senior Director of Regulatory Affairs and Regulatory Science at Dexcom.
Dr. Corliss / Dan Jim Corliss — Introduced himself as senior director of biotech innovation at Lilly Ventures, the strategic venture arm of Eli Lilly.
Dan Jim Corliss — Described his background, education, and role helping Lilly use AI to improve patient lives.
James Diggins — James Diggins, representing Twist Bioscience and the International Gene Synthesis Consortium, explains how Twist receives DNA orders as digital sequences, manufactures synthetic DNA in U.S. facilities, and uses scale to lower costs for customers across applications such as agriculture and drug development. He then discusses how AI is accelerating biological design by generating candidate sequences and expanding protein-design exploration, while also increasing the importance of laboratory-generated data for training models and creating new customer demand for Twist’s high-throughput services. Diggins emphasizes that only a small number of organizations can synthesize DNA at scale, which makes biosecurity screening critical, notes Twist already screens orders and supports AB 1864, and describes collaboration with Microsoft Research and others to test whether AI tools could evade screening. He closes by urging California to align with federal standards, support defensive datasets and CalCompute, and avoid regulating the outputs of design models while focusing oversight on the manufacture of DNA.
AB1864 — AB 1864 is introduced as an Assembly bill by Assembly Member Berman and described as requiring California gene synthesis providers to conduct screening. The speaker indicates support for the bill’s goals and later reiterates support for AB 1864 while urging that federal standards be relied on.
Marc Berman — Referenced as the Assembly Member who introduced AB 1864.
Dr. David Magnus — Dr. David Magnus presents Stanford’s approach to oversight and governance of AI across clinical care and research. He explains how Stanford evaluates AI tools for fit, training-data concerns, and implementation impacts, emphasizing ethical assessment and stakeholder input before deployment. He then turns to research oversight, describing the limitations of traditional IRB review for downstream consequences and Stanford’s Ethics and Society Review (ESR) process as a way to fill that gap, including iterative review, a case where Stanford rejected a proposal, and feedback showing the process prompted researchers to think more carefully about privacy and mitigation. He concludes by warning that AI combined with biotechnology creates serious dual-use and misuse risks, including potential bioweapon design and other harmful applications.
Christine Von Rasefeld — Introduced as a board member and community liaison for the Light Collective.
Christine von Raysfeld — Introduced herself as a patient and research advocate and board member/community liaison with the Light Collective.
constituents advocating on behalf of Pediatric Brain Cancer Awareness Month — Constituents were described as advocating for pediatric brain cancer awareness and data use to help other children.
Katie Shilton — Cited as having built an ethics identification tool at the University of Maryland.