Five major tech companies have committed more than $40 million to CAIA, a new research initiative dedicated to improving cancer care. 

CAIA launched today during a Seattle event hosted by Madrona Venture Group. CAIA stands for Cancer AI Alliance, a nod to the fact that the participants will use artificial intelligence to support their clinical work. 

The launch of the initiative was led by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. The institute also helped secure CAIA’s initial funding. Fred Hutchinson’s responsibilities going forward will include, among others, coordinating research collaborations among CAIA members.

In addition to Fred Hutchinson, CAIA includes three other cancer research institutions on launch. They are the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center. The latter institute is affiliated with John Hopkins University, which will also participate through its Whiting School of Engineering.

The tech firms that provided CAIA’s initial funding, in turn, include Amazon Web Services Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Nvidia Corp. Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Ltd. and Slalom Consulting LLC, two major players in the information technology services market, contributed as well.

 “Together, we will accelerate innovation in cancer discovery and treatments, deploy generative AI at scale, and leverage the power, agility, and security of cloud computing to revolutionize health and patient outcomes,” said AWS Chief Executive Officer Matt Garman.

One of CAIA’s goals is to advance the development of industry standards that can support cancer research. Additionally, the group will provide participating medical institutes with infrastructure for processing the data they collect during cancer care delivery. That data includes medical images, electronic health records and other files. 

CAIA members plan to collaborate on research projects through an approach called federated AI. Sometimes, clinical collaborations require participants to share raw medical data, which can create cybersecurity risks. CAIA says its federated AI implementation mitigates those risks. 

According to Fred Hutchinson, the technology will enable researchers to analyze a dataset using an AI model and make the results available to colleagues without sharing the underlying data. This avoids the cybersecurity issues that can emerge when medical records are moved between different organizations. Under CAIA’s federated AI framework, each participating research center will maintain its own separate data repositories and AI models. 

CAIA hopes to advance cancer research in multiple ways. The group envisions its members collaborating to uncover new insights into tumor biology. Another focus of CAIA’s research efforts will be identifying therapeutic targets, which are molecules or processes associated with cancer that could potentially be targeted to improve treatment. 

“The convergence of AI, multimodal healthcare data and federated learning will usher in a new era for cancer research,” said Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

CAIA plans to begin operating this year and expects to start producing research by the end of 2025. In parallel, CAIA’s governing committee will establish membership criteria as part of its efforts to bring more organizations into the fold. The goal is to increase the number of participating researchers and raise $1 billion in the long term to support their work.

Photo: Fred Hutch