Blackstone's Tony James Backs Mount Sinai's $100 Million AI Push

(Bloomberg) -- Another Blackstone Group executive is hopping on the AI philanthropy bandwagon.

Eight months after Chief Executive Officer Steve Schwarzman pledged $350 million to establish a college of computing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Executive Vice Chairman Tony James and wife Amabel are providing the funds to create a center for artificial intelligence and human health at Mount Sinai’s medical school in New York.

“Steve and I didn’t compare notes on this,” James, 68, said in an interview. “But it was the same thesis: We’ll make it so much more concrete, it will be a leap forward if we bring it together in one place.”

The Jameses’ gift of an undisclosed amount will pay for dozens of researchers focused on genomics, disease modeling and precision imaging, and a new building in Upper Manhattan to house them. The space and the programs within it -- some funded by other sources -- comprise about a $100 million investment, Dennis Charney, dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, said in an interview.

Combining machine learning with the life sciences is what clicked for James. “It’s like taking this roaring fire of what’s coming out of the labs and throwing gasoline on it, and it’s a huge accelerant,” James said, emphasizing the potential of cross-disciplinary chance encounters. “That’s how you get these real leaps of creativity.”

Diverse Data

The health-care industry is increasingly using artificial intelligence as it seeks to improve everything from how doctors understand diseases and pharmaceutical companies develop new treatments to how hospitals deliver care.

Mount Sinai’s advantage is that it has one of the largest and most diverse patient-data samples in the country, according to Eric Nestler, a dean at the medical school. The data have already helped create a predictive model of patients most likely to fall at the hospital. The pathology department is developing a digital approach to estimating the severity of prostate cancer. Last year, Mount Sinai researchers spun out a company called RenalytixAI, which attempts to use patient data to better predict the course of chronic kidney disease.

About five years ago, Blackstone began “thinking about the fact that we’re the ultimate old-economy dinosaur and the world is changing so fast, and all our companies are being impacted. We didn’t want want to be left behind," James said. The firm began to “lean into” technology disruption and the life sciences.

Life Sciences

Blackstone is the world’s second-largest owner of life sciences office space, and has invested about $20 billion in health care, according to the company. In October, it agreed to buy Clarus Corp., which bets on biotech, medical-device makers and diagnostics companies. In February, the life-sciences group started Anthos Therapeutics, its first company in partnership with Novartis AG. Anthos is developing what it hopes will be a new kind of blood thinner.

James joined the board of Mount Sinai Health System around the time the firm began its push into the life sciences. This position added health care to his portfolio of causes that includes the Metropolitan Museum of Art, conservation and policy initiatives related to retirement security and student loans. Though he believes every American deserves access to good health care, James said he’s not planning on starting a policy initiative focused on it.

“There are only so many windmills I can tilt at and still remain standing,” he said.

Spending time with scientists plays into some of his earlier interests. In school, “we used physics for fun,” James said, describing how he and friends once rigged the radiator system to bug other rooms in their dorm to listen in on conversations. “I don’t do that anymore.”

Instead, James attends meetings of the Mount Sinai board’s science committee. One of the more fascinating presentations, he said, was about an effort to develop a vaccine that you take once in your life and never get a cold or flu again.

To contact the reporters on this story: Amanda Gordon in New York at agordon01@bloomberg.net;Heather Perlberg in Washington at hperlberg@bloomberg.net;John Tozzi in New York at jtozzi2@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Pierre Paulden at ppaulden@bloomberg.net, Steven Crabill, Peter Eichenbaum

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