JPM25, Day 2: News from Nvidia, Tempus AI and Health Catalyst; A look at Children's Health Dallas' expansion plans

SAN FRANCISCO—The annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference is officially underway, bringing the healthcare and biopharma industries' biggest wheelers and dealers to San Francisco. For a look at some of the biggest trends to watch this week, check out our preview here.

We have you covered with the biggest updates from Tuesday's sessions in this roundup, as well as across our website. On deck today: Progyny, Privia Health, CommonSpirit Health, Mayo Clinic, The Johns Hopkins Health System, Premier, Ardent Health and a lineup of digital health companies.

Check out our Monday roundup here.

Keep up with news from biopharma thanks to the Fierce Biotech team in their daily tracker, too.

Follow along with all of our JPM 2025 coverage here


Tuesday, 11 am. PT, Jan. 14

Dallas-based Children's Health offers look at expansion plans

Children's Health in Dallas was one of the closing sessions at JPM's not-for-profit track, and the pediatric provider said that it's putting a focus on several key expansion projects.

This work includes an expansion of its campus in Plano, Texas as well as a new pediatric campus in Dallas, CEO Chris Durovich told investors on Tuesday morning. He said that the new Dallas campus would grow the number of pediatric beds Children's Health has in the city by 40%.

The facility will include nearly 100 beds in its neonatal intensive care unit and additional space for surgery. Plus, they're designing it with the flexibility to add new innovative spaces in the future.

In addition, the campus will have a pedestrian walkway that connects to the William P. Clements Jr. University Hospital, a key teaching facility as part of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center system. That physical tie will enable pediatric patients to grow into adult care across a walkable bridge, Durovich said.

For example, a patient with a congenital heart condition can get the immediate postnatal and childhood care that they need through Children's Health and then have a warm hand off to the experts at Clements as they get older, Durovich said.

"Our maternal fetal medicine program will be able to serve those kids and moms as they come into the world, and those kids will make their way across the bridge, if you will, as they get older and they move into adult congenital heart disease treatment," he said.

Children's Health is working closely with UT Southwestern as part of its broader expansion efforts, Durovich said. They've also joined foces on a new medical research institute and are partnering on the Texas Behavioral Health Center at UT Southwestern.

Other expansion efforts include new specialty centers in several different regions, including one that's opened in Prosper already. The Children's Health team is also looking at primary care growth, including potential acquisitions.

"We enjoy a 60 year academic affiliation. We enjoy a market leadership position in our part of the world, we have proven leadership clinically and a seasoned executive team who's been on board now for almost a decade, in the aggregate, clinical excellence in all 11 specialties, strategic investments, strong performance and philanthropic support, which we believe makes us an attractive investment in the kids healthcare space," Durovich said.

Tuesday, 7:30 a.m. PT, Jan. 14

Protesters accuse healthcare industry of putting "profits over people"

As the first day of the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference 2025 drew to an end, attendees leaving the Westin St. Francis in San Francisco were met with a group of about 40 protesters who accused the industry of putting profits above people’s lives, Fierce Pharma Deputy Editor Angus Liu reported.

The annual conference opened Monday with notably increased police presence compared with prior year events as the healthcare industry reels from the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in New York City in December.

One protester standing in front of the conference venue’s Powell Street entrance engaged in a face-off with a line of police officers, holding a sign that read “Luigi’s shot heard round the world – Kill profiteering not people,” referring to Luigi Mangione, the suspect now charged with murder in the deadly shooting of Thompson.

As the organizer, J.P. Morgan also took some blame with one sign that read “J P Morgan + United Healthcare = Denials, Delay, Depose.” The words were reference to “delay,” “deny” and “depose,” which were reportedly found inscribed on the bullets at the scene of Thompson’s shooting.

At about 5 p.m. local time, as Monday’s confab finished its second-to-last presentations, some 20 protesters were seen at the scene on both sides of Powell Street, while about a dozen police officers were present, some wearing bullet proof vests. Conference goers were largely unfazed by the episode.

UnitedHealth Group did not attend the conference this year as a presenter. Cigna and Centene were both listed as companies that would attend on an earlier iteration of the conference agenda but backed out. Healthcare giants CVS Health and Walgreens choose not to attend this year's JPM event. The only health plans represented are smaller plans, Alignment Healthcare and Clover Health. 

Tuesday, 7:00 a.m. PT, Jan. 14

Tempus AI unveils new GenAI capabilities to query unstructured healthcare data

Precision medicine company Tempus AI, which uses artificial intelligence to process medical data, announced this week new capabilities within its generative AI assistant. Tempus One, which initially launched in 2023, provides both physicians and researchers AI-enabled services that leverage generative AI for decision support in the clinic while simultaneously advancing research to bring new drugs to market, the company said.

This latest iteration now applies Tempus’ proprietary Large Language Model (LLM) Agent Infrastructure (Agent Builder), which adapts LLMs to work on unstructured, multimodal healthcare data to improve clinical care and research.

Founded in 2015, Tempus, led by Groupon co-founder Eric Lefkofsky, says it’s built the world’s largest library of clinical and molecular data along with an operating system to make those data accessible and useful for providers to inform patient care. Over the past seven years, Tempus built out capabilities in precision medicine and AI to power drug discovery and genomic sequencing.

Tempus is building and deploying a series of AI models on top of its library of real-world, multimodal data for physicians and researchers. The latest iteration of Tempus One includes four new generative AI-powered capabilities for patient query, patient timelines, prior authorization and data exploration that enables researchers to ask questions and receive answers that are derived from both Tempus’ de-identified curated datasets and unstructured data housed within its data analytics platform.

Tuesday, 6 a.m. PT, Jan. 14

Nvidia inks partnerships with Mayo, Illumina for AI agents, genomics

AI chipmaker Nvidia continues to notch high-profile partnerships with healthcare and life sciences companies to boost the healthcare sector using artificial intelligence technologies.

Companies will use Nvidia's technologies to advance drug discovery, enhance genomic research and push novel ways to use agentic and generative AI.

The company unveiled partnerships with IQVIA, Illumina and Mayo Clinic and the Arc Institute, the company announced at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in San Francisco this week.

These solutions include AI agents that can speed clinical trials by reducing administrative burden, AI models that learn from biology instruments to advance drug discovery and digital pathology, and physical AI robots for surgery, patient monitoring and operations. 

Mayo Clinic has been moving forward rapidly to harness AI technolgoy for digital pathology. It's Digital Pathology platform was built from autonomous robotic labs and advanced imaging technology with a unique dataset of 20 million whole-slide images with 10 million associated patient records to enable the creation of foundation models. Mayo Clinic tapped Nvidia to accelerate the development of next-generation pathology foundation models. 

ayo Clinic and NVIDIA are pioneering this work to serve as a cornerstone for future AI applications in drug discovery, and personalized diagnostics and treatments, the companies said.

IQVIA, a provider of clinical research services, is using the NVIDIA AI Foundry service to build custom foundation models on its more than 64 petabytes of information. The company is also developing agentic AI solutions that can speed research, clinical development and access to new treatments. 

Illumina, a DNA sequencing and informatics technologies company, is working with Nvidia to use accelerated computing and AI toolsets for its multiomics analysis software and workflows. This will help make analysis of — and insights from — the human genome more accessible to researchers, pharmaceutical companies and other life sciences customers, the companies said.

Arc Institute, a Palo Alto, California-based research organization operating at the intersection of biology and machine learning, is collaborating with NVIDIA to develop and share powerful AI models and tools that advance biomedical discovery.

Tuesday, 5 a.m. PT, Jan. 14

Health Catalyst picks up patient engagement solutions provider

Data and analytics company Health Catalyst has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Upfront Healthcare Services to expand its patient engagement capabilities.

Health Catalyst anticipates the acquisition will close in the first quarter of 2025. The company plans to fund the transaction with a mix of cash and stock. 

Health Catalyst is slated to present at JPM on Wednesday morning.

Upfront provides a patient activation and engagement platform and a proprietary strategic marketing analytics and content personalization solution for healthcare enterprises. 

The combination of Upfront's patient acquisition and scheduling expertise with Health Catalyst's current patient engagement portfolio is expected to strengthen the patient experience foundation set by Twistle Patient Engagement by Health Catalyst and the Lumeon by Health Catalyst Care Orchestration platform, which both help patients stay informed throughout the care process, the company said in a press release.

The company plans to integrate Upfront's technology into its offerings, as Upfront's technology analyzes clinical, sociodemographic, and patient-reported data to digitally guide patients to the care they need.