Four of the nation’s leading cancer centers are coming together to work on AI through a newly formed collaborative, the Cancer AI Alliance (CAIA).
With funding and AI technology provided by Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Deloitte, NVIDIA and Slalom, the cancer centers will be able to find trends across high volumes of cancer data that could result in new treatments.
The collaboration marks one of the first attempts for public companies to unite their data resources to gain ground on a devastating disease that eludes a cure.
The four foundational members of CAIA are the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and the Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins. AWS is the alliance’s foundational partner.
While individual cancer centers will keep their data in-house, CAIA will provide computational resources and help maintain compliance with regulatory and privacy requirements.
Tapping into the data of these centers will allow them to derive insights about rare cancers and study small subgroups of patients, of which each institution may have precious few records. With the use of AI, researchers could find new therapeutic targets, discover tumor biology and explore treatment resistance.
“Collectively, the data held by the nation’s leading cancer centers has been an untapped source of new cancer discoveries that has been out of reach. This alliance helps solve the key technical challenges that will enable us to securely use both AI and massive computational power to find these breakthrough insights and save more lives,” Thomas J. Lynch Jr., M.D., Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center president and director, said in a statement.
CAIA will leverage a federated AI learning framework in which AI models will effectively be sent to each institution to run on their data. CAIA will then aggregate the findings across institutions to produce novel insights.
CAIA has received more than $40 million in funding and will be supported by leading AI technology from AWS, Deloitte, Microsoft, NVIDIA and Slalom. CAIA’s goal is to grow to support $1 billion in resources and add more members. The membership criteria will be determined in the coming months by CAIA’s governing committee.
“We are at a breakthrough moment for finding cancer cures thanks to rapid advancement in AI. With leading AI capabilities, diverse data types and standards, and modern cloud infrastructure in place, thoughtful collaboration across leading cancer research centers can help accelerate progress. The Cancer AI Alliance will be integral in this lifesaving work, and we are proud to be supporters,” Juan Lavista Ferres, Microsoft's corporate vice president and chief data scientist, said in a statement.
CAIA is expected to be up and running by the end of 2024 and to produce its first insights by the end of 2025.