The UK’s most powerful supercomputer, which its creators hope will make the process of preventing, diagnosing and treating disease better, faster and cheaper, is operational. The Guardian reports: Christened Cambridge-1, the supercomputer represents a $100m investment by US-based computing company Nvidia. The idea capitalizes on artificial intelligence (AI) — which combines big data with computer science to facilitate problem-solving — in healthcare. […] Cambridge-1’s first projects will be with AstraZeneca, GSK, Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS foundation trust, King’s College London and Oxford Nanopore. They will seek to develop a deeper understanding of diseases such as dementia, design new drugs, and improve the accuracy of finding disease-causing variations in human genomes. A key way the supercomputer can help, said Dr Kim Branson, global head of artificial intelligence and machine learning at GSK, is in patient care. In the field of immuno-oncology, for instance, existing medicines harness the patient’s own immune system to fight cancer. But it isn’t always apparent which patients will gain the most benefit from these drugs — some of that information is hidden in the imaging of the tumors and in numerical clues found in blood. Cambridge-1 can be key to helping fuse these different datasets, and building large models to help determine the best course of treatment for patients, Branson said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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