Latest news with #JimSwanson
Globe and Mail
2 days ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
Columbia Sportswear Company to Announce Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results on Thursday, July 31, 2025
Columbia Sportswear Company (Nasdaq: COLM) plans to release second quarter 2025 financial results at approximately 4:05 p.m. ET on Thursday, July 31, 2025. At approximately 4:15 p.m. ET, a commentary by Jim Swanson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, reviewing the company's second quarter 2025 financial results will be furnished to the SEC on Form 8-K and published to the company's website at Analysts and investors are encouraged to review this commentary prior to participating in a conference call hosted by senior management at 5:00 p.m. ET. To listen to the conference call, please dial 888-506-0062. The call will also be webcast live on the Investor Relations section of the Company's website at where it will remain available until approximately July 31, 2026. Columbia Sportswear Company connects active people with their passions and is a global multi-brand leading innovator in outdoor, active and lifestyle products including apparel, footwear, accessories, and equipment. Founded in 1938 in Portland, Oregon, the company's brands are today sold in more than 100 countries. In addition to the Columbia® brand, Columbia Sportswear Company also owns the Mountain Hard Wear®, SOREL®, and prAna® brands. To learn more, please visit the company's websites at and
Business Wire
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Wire
Columbia Sportswear Company to Announce Second Quarter 2025 Financial Results on Thursday, July 31, 2025
PORTLAND, Ore.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Columbia Sportswear Company (Nasdaq: COLM) plans to release second quarter 2025 financial results at approximately 4:05 p.m. ET on Thursday, July 31, 2025. At approximately 4:15 p.m. ET, a commentary by Jim Swanson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, reviewing the company's second quarter 2025 financial results will be furnished to the SEC on Form 8-K and published to the company's website at Analysts and investors are encouraged to review this commentary prior to participating in a conference call hosted by senior management at 5:00 p.m. ET. To listen to the conference call, please dial 888-506-0062. The call will also be webcast live on the Investor Relations section of the Company's website at where it will remain available until approximately July 31, 2026. Columbia Sportswear Company connects active people with their passions and is a global multi-brand leading innovator in outdoor, active and lifestyle products including apparel, footwear, accessories, and equipment. Founded in 1938 in Portland, Oregon, the company's brands are today sold in more than 100 countries. In addition to the Columbia® brand, Columbia Sportswear Company also owns the Mountain Hard Wear®, SOREL®, and prAna® brands. To learn more, please visit the company's websites at and
Atlantic
14-04-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
How collaboration sparks innovation, transforming patient outcomes. Illustrations by Ibrahim Rayintakath The Human Side of Tech-Enabled Healthcare
or decades, doctors, scientists, and engineers developing new treatments and advanced medical technologies have faced seemingly insurmountable challenges: diseases that are difficult to detect, injuries that can be only partially healed by available surgeries, and conditions without effective cures. Today, health and tech partnerships are changing all that. By harnessing new advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and cloud computing, health-care and technology companies are collaborating to tackle health care's most complex challenges. They're also doing it faster and more effectively than ever before. 7,000 Johnson & Johnson, while primarily known as America's leading healthcare company, now employs nearly 7,000 digital specialists and data scientists. For example, in the past, researchers trying to develop a breakthrough drug often had to do immense amounts of trial-and-error lab work to discover a single molecule with the potential to treat a disease. Now, AI is helping to crunch vast quantities of data so they can more efficiently make decisions in developing lifesaving medicines. 'Using AI, we can analyze our data in a number of different ways, finding subtle signals that we didn't see by conventional methods,' says Justin Scheer, the vice president of In Silico Discovery at Johnson & Johnson. 'This can shave years off the process, and for an oncology patient who doesn't have years, that can make all the difference in the world.' Johnson & Johnson, while primarily known as the United States' leading health-care company, now employs nearly 7,000 digital specialists and data scientists. It also collaborates with cloud computing and AI pioneers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) to use cutting-edge technologies to supercharge its medical discoveries. By uniting science and technology—and two American companies that are global leaders in their respective industries—Johnson & Johnson is accelerating the discovery, development, and delivery of life-changing medicines and medical technology, helping to solve health-care challenges once thought unsolvable. 'Today, we've reached the point where innovation in health care depends upon innovation in technology,' says Jim Swanson, Johnson & Johnson's chief information officer. 'It's a perfect blend of capabilities that will guide us to a deeper understanding of diseases and conditions and offer breakthroughs in smarter, more personalized treatments.' Accelerating Drug Discoveries Innovative partnerships have always been at the heart of medical progress. From health-care providers and researchers to governments and academia, collaboration fuels innovation. Now, health and tech players are combining deep scientific expertise with the power of data to tackle some of health care's most complex challenges, including developing lifesaving medicines. Despite remarkable advancements, roughly 90 percent of clinical drugs never make it to the market. Improving that number is critical to changing the lives of patients waiting for new therapies. Johnson & Johnson is working to develop treatments faster and more effectively than ever before. The key to this is data—and Johnson & Johnson has decades of it. The 139-year-old company has collected anonymized information from patients and clinical-trial results. With that, Johnson & Johnson has built a massive chemical library, in which each molecule is labeled with bioactivity data—detailed insights on how a molecule interacts with different biological systems. Researchers need this information to identify promising candidates to develop into novel treatments. ← → To help accomplish that, the company has created a biosignature platform that offers medical scientists a holistic view of how new molecules affect biology. Data is fed into AI and ML algorithms to help them create biosignatures—essentially unique fingerprints for biological activity—which help scientists visualize and understand the effects of new molecules on different parts of a cell. Those biosignatures are then combined with existing data to infer hypotheses and make more accurate predictions about bioactivity. This process requires a massive amount of computing power, which is where tech companies like AWS come into play. Johnson & Johnson works with them to merge medical know-how with high-performance computing power and cloud capabilities to accelerate breakthroughs in some of the hardest-to-treat areas. 'By establishing strong data foundations in the cloud, health-care and life-sciences organizations can rapidly experiment and innovate, empowering their teams to work smarter while maintaining the highest standards of security and privacy,' says Dan Sheeran, the general manager of health care and life science at AWS. These tools give us the right data at the right time. –Ryan Donahoe, Head of R&D, Orthopaedics, Johnson & Johnson MedTech Already, the biosignature platform has enabled Johnson & Johnson to test more than 2 million compounds across 40 different cellular disease models, generating more than 15 million images to identify novel starting points and help optimize drug candidates. All in all, this process is having a huge impact by allowing scientists to more quickly single out patterns for drug discovery. 'Ultimately, this process reduces the number of iterations, helping us reach the best outcome for patients and do it faster,' says Scheer. For instance, the medical scientists at Johnson & Johnson were studying a type of cancer, but they were not able to pinpoint compounds using traditional methods. 'We had no way of identifying the needles in the haystack, so to speak,' Scheer says. Using AI, however, the scientists made a digital replica of the cellular phenotype, compared it to the 2 million compounds in their library, and virtually determined drug starting points that elicit the same phenotype. 'A scientist couldn't have done this by looking in a microscope,' Scheer says. 'It's so detailed that you need the AI algorithm to pull out the signal.' The biosignature project is still in its early phases, but it has the potential to offer entirely new treatments for cancer patients. As Scheer says, 'We're leveraging the world's data to make advances for health and humanity.' Advancing Smarter, More Personalized Treatments Digitalization efforts, like advanced AI, are not only supporting the creation of more targeted therapeutic drugs but also helping companies such as Johnson & Johnson develop more effective, personalized medical devices for patients. Johnson & Johnson's orthopaedics research and development (R&D) team, for instance, is leveraging a suite of in silico (in or on a computer) tools and techniques to evaluate personalized hip and knee implants, predicting their feasibility under varied conditions prior to manufacturing a physical product. With nearly 1.3 million knee replacements and up to 760,000 hip replacements performed on Americans each year, precise implant design is essential. In comparison with traditional R&D practices, in silico approaches like physics-based modeling and AI training on large datasets play a crucial role in accelerating innovation while improving outcomes, enhancing product quality and reducing time to market. By utilizing high-performance computing environments, such as those powered by AWS's cloud-based infrastructure, the orthopaedics R&D team can efficiently scale compute resources to meet demands. These tools enable engineers to gain deeper insights into the safety, efficacy, and performance of their products through rapid iterations, as well as a better understanding of complex interactions. 'Imagine you're going in for a joint replacement surgery, a procedure that can transform how you live your life,' says Ryan Donahoe, head of R&D, Orthopaedics, at Johnson & Johnson MedTech. 'Having the right implant can make the difference for patients, allowing them to get moving again, which is why we constantly look to advance our product designs through these high-tech prototypes.' We're leveraging the world's data to make advances for health and humanity. –Justin Scheer, the vice president of In Silico Discovery at Johnson & Johnson The Johnson & Johnson MedTech team is also developing innovations for health-care providers. Surgical environments, for instance, are being enhanced with high-performance computing so that doctors can review data from their tools after a procedure, collect insights, and use that information to enhance future performance. 'These tools give us the right data at the right time,' says Donahoe. 'Partnering with AWS on high-performance computing has really given us a framework to be able to scale faster solutions for patients.' The promise of medical breakthroughs powered by technologies is only beginning to be realized. As health-care and tech companies continue to work together, they'll advance the discovery of new molecules to treat diseases and develop more personalized devices for patients. 'From powering advanced R&D in orthopaedics to enabling sophisticated drug discovery platforms and streamlining critical processes, cloud solutions are leading to the discovery of the next-generation treatments,' says Sheeran of AWS. 'It drives efficiency, reduces costs, and improves patient care while promoting U.S. competitiveness.' Ultimately, the future of tech-enabled health care will benefit patients in profound ways—improving the future of treatment for all. 'It all comes down to our mission,' says Swanson. 'We're not just incrementally improving health care. We're committed to transforming it. To do that, you need the best science, best technology, and best people, and together with our partners, we have all three.' Read more about this at
Yahoo
10-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
How pharmaceutical companies are training their workers on AI
Pharmaceutical giants such as J&J, Merck, and Eli Lilly are embracing AI and prioritizing upskilling. They hope that training thousands of employees on generative AI will boost productivity in drug development. This article is part of "AI in Action," a series exploring how companies are implementing AI innovations. Johnson & Johnson is embracing the concept of a bilingual employee — but not in the classic sense. For the pharmaceutical company, literacy is needed in specialized and core job skills, including research, supply chain, and finance. Then there's fluency in AI technology. "There are so many ways we've been using AI," said Jim Swanson, the chief information officer of J&J. "But to do that effectively, we had to really create a curriculum and a mindset around upskilling." More than 56,000 of J&J's 138,000 workers have taken a generative AI training course, which is required before any employee is authorized to use the technology. After training, J&J's employees can utilize generative AI tools for summarization and prompt engineering, the latter a skill to ask the right question to get the best output from a large language model. A separate, more in-depth digital boot camp that covers topics including AI, augmented reality, and automation has recorded more than 37,000 cumulative hours of training from more than 14,000 employees. Generative AI offers the promise of more quickly identifying compounds for new treatments and vaccines, accelerating drug development, streamlining regulatory compliance, optimizing which patients are best suited for clinical trials, and improving how new drugs are marketed. Deborah Golden, Deloitte's US chief innovation officer, said these advancements were poised to change which skills the pharmaceutical industry prioritizes in recruitment. Biology and chemistry knowledge will still be needed, but it isn't as essential for newer roles like AI engineers, and other new roles might require a mix of traditional expertise and AI know-how if AI-driven drug discovery proliferates. "When you think about how AI is shifting the balance and the talent requirements, you really need to be able to speak both the language of biology and AI models," Golden said. Generative AI could save the pharmaceutical industry tens of billions of dollars each year through improved productivity within drug development. J&J, the maker of treatments like the immunosuppressive drug Stelara and Darzalex, a medication for treating the cancer multiple myeloma, has used more traditional forms of AI for almost a decade. Use cases include AI-enabled software tools that can guide a surgeon through a procedure, speed up drug discovery, and help drug makers manage inventory more effectively. In 2023, J&J piloted a six-week digital immersion program that focused on AI, data science, and other emerging technologies. More than 2,500 employees participated last year, taking 90-minute classes each week, and J&J is planning further expansion this year. Swanson told Business Insider it was critical for company leaders to create a culture that promotes technological literacy. "We've been around 135 years. We've had to reinvent ourselves multiple times to stay relevant and current," he said. The pharmaceutical giant Merck's early generative AI investments included the development of a proprietary platform called GPTeal. Merck — which is responsible for the HPV vaccine Gardasil and the immunotherapy drug Keytruda — said that GPTeal gives employees access to large language models such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Meta's Llama, and Anthropic's Claude while keeping company data secure from external exposures. Employees are also using generative AI to draft emails and memos and for other productivity-focused tasks, but Merck's aspirations are also getting bolder. "Now, the journey is clearly to identify, implement, track, and measure use cases that have a dramatic impact on our business," said Ron Kim, a senior vice president and the chief technology officer of Merck. Generative AI allows Merck's employees more time to focus on higher-impact tasks. In drug discovery, for example, generative AI can help draft (human-reviewed) regulatory documents that are submitted to health authorities. "We felt like some of our scientists were taking time being copyeditors," Kim said. "That's not what they trained for." Kim said more than 50,000 Merck employees were using GPTeal regularly. The company supported upskilling through a mix of self-serve digital training courses, monthly webcasts focused on generative AI, and boot camps for software developers that could last anywhere from half a day to 10 days. Dr. Daniel Stevens, the chief medical officer at Blue Earth Therapeutics, said AI was alluring to the clinical-stage radiopharmaceutical company because, as a small startup founded in 2021, it has to be judicious with how it spends capital. "The application of artificial intelligence is of interest, because it may help us with some of our efficiency goals," Stevens said. A $76.5 million Series A in October, which included funding from the healthcare investment firm Soleus Capital and the diagnostic imaging company Bracco Diagnostics, was mostly intended to support clinical trials that will assess the safety and effectiveness of new prostate cancer treatments. Stevens said that with just 20 full-time employees, Blue Earth has not yet needed to offer AI upskill training. He added that when Blue Earth grows its employee base and is ready to offer instruction about the technology, it plans to use online courses and AI certifications from external vendors. Eli Lilly, the pharmaceutical giant behind treatments including the antidepressant Prozac and the type 2 diabetes and weight loss medicine Mounjaro, has used generative AI to support the research of both small and large molecules. The company also used AI to generate documentation for clinical trials and create materials for regulatory submissions. After ChatGPT launched, major employers such as Apple and Amazon restricted employee use of the popular chatbot, with many citing concerns about data privacy. "We went in the exact opposite direction," said Diogo Rau, the chief information and digital officer at Eli Lilly. Rau encouraged Eli Lilly's workforce to embrace the tool without exposing sensitive company information, similar to how an employee might use Google Search. "We told everybody you need to use it, you need to start bringing ChatGPT into your work," said Rau. But, he added, "Don't put anything in there that you don't want to get out." The company also internally sought to bolster interest with an "AI Games" competition timed to the Summer Olympics in Paris. Contests involved using a chatbot to write a message to a colleague or relying on generative AI to make a quiz about Eli Lilly's history. In 2024, Eli Lilly also encouraged all employees and managers to use generative AI for their year-end reviews. This year, the company is set to require all senior leaders and managers to obtain an AI certification. "We've got a workforce that is embracing AI," Rau said, adding that employees often stopped him in the office or emailed him to share the ways they were applying AI to their daily work tasks. Read the original article on Business Insider
