The strategy recognises the importance of AI-ready datasets, powerful national compute resources such as Isambard-AI and Dawn, and a highly skilled workforce able to work across AI and biomedical science. Researchers across the Nuffield Department of Medicine (NDM) noted that these priorities align strongly with the direction of ongoing research in Oxford.
NDM Associate Professor and medical oncologist Dr Lennard Lee, Centre for Immuno-Oncology, who contributed evidence to the strategy, emphasised the particular opportunity for cancer research. “I welcome the government’s commitment, a key next step could be the development of a national AI-ready Cancer British Atlas - a coordinated, high-quality dataset bringing together genomics, immune responses, pathology, imaging and clinical outcomes. Linked to sovereign AI compute, this would radically accelerate our ability to design and test future cancer vaccines.”
Oxford researchers and partners are already demonstrating what this approach can deliver through the UK Cancer Vaccine AI & Supercomputing Project, which uses national GPU resources to build immune and genomic AI models that support the development of personalised and preventative cancer vaccines.
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Medicine website.