Siddhartha Mukherjee, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, oncologist and co-founder of biotech company Manas AI, spoke at the OU Presidential Speakers Series dinner Wednesday.
Over 700 people, including OU faculty, students, OU President Joseph Harroz Jr. and State Regents for Higher Education Chancellor Sean Burrage, attended the event.
Mukherjee is the co-founder of Manas AI, a biotechnology company using artificial intelligence to accelerate drug discovery. He is currently on a two-year leave from his position as an assistant professor of medicine at Columbia University to lead the company.
His book “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer” won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, and “The Gene: An Intimate History” was a No. 1 New York Times bestseller in 2016. Both were adapted into separate PBS documentary series by filmmakers Ken Burns and Barak Goodman.
Teaching AI to design medicines
Mukherjee’s talk traced AI’s growing role across the full arc of cancer care — from prevention and early detection to drug discovery — using his own company’s work as an example.
A significant portion of his talk focused on Manas AI's approach to what he called generative chemistry — training AI models to design new drug molecules from scratch, rather than relying on compounds found in nature.
“We use laws, chemistry, physics and biology to find, design medicines, …” Mukherjee said. “So at Manas, the big idea was how do we teach a foundation model to create medicines using generative chemistry?”
Mukherjee said he considers cognitive and caregiving professions immune to AI, meaning these fields won’t be replaced by AI, but transformed by it. He added he wouldn’t trust a physician who did not use the vast medical knowledge AI can provide.
Mukherjee said identifying where on a protein a drug molecule should bind is one of the central challenges in AI-driven drug discovery. One approach that emerged, he said, came from a student's idea of using AI to simulate thousands of virtual points across the surface of a protein to find likely binding sites, an idea Mukherjee credited with helping the company make progress on the problem.
He said Manas AI has used the approach to design five drug candidates so far, and that identifying a disease-related target in the body and designing a compound to act on it typically takes pharmaceutical companies five to seven years. According to Mukherjee, Manas AI recently completed that same process — identifying a target to optimize a drug candidate — for one molecule in just 10 weeks.
Mukherjee also pointed to AI’s growing role in cancer detection, citing a study that found breast radiologists using AI-assisted screening had a 13.8% higher cancer detection rate than those without.
What Oklahoma should prioritize
During a Q&A session, Mukherjee was asked what he would prioritize if he were building a research enterprise in a state that has increased cases of disease, like Oklahoma.
“What you want to do in a place where their resources are losing is change human perception, change human behavior.”
Mukherjee said he would not try to replicate the kind of large-scale molecular and biomedical research enterprises found at established institutions.
“I will not create the kind of enterprise that the Harvards and Stanfords of the world have, which are enormous research enterprises that ... focus on molecular and ... very non-behavioral deep biomedical sciences, …” Mukherjee said. “But if you want to see a map of the largest gains for (an) under-resourced space, (it) is most likely in behavioral health.”
He pointed to smoking, obesity and not seeking out clinical care when needed as examples of behavioral factors that could be addressed to reduce disease burden in the state.
Oklahoma ranked No. 45 out of 50 states overall in health in 2025, according to America's Health Rankings, which measures health outcomes alongside social, economic, clinical and behavioral factors. Oklahoma’s overall cancer mortality rate is 14% higher than the national average, according to the Stephenson Cancer Center, with the gap more pronounced for certain cancers — lung and bronchus deaths run 28% above the national rate, cervix cancer 19% higher and kidney and renal pelvis cancer 30% higher.
OU Health has responded in part by expanding Stephenson Cancer Center, the state's only National Cancer Institute-designated cancer center, into Norman, Oklahoma City, Tulsa and McAlester, along with mobile screening units meant to assist with early detection of cancer.
This story was edited by Macey Thaxton. This story was copy edited by Lauren Brogdon and Larkin Bock.
