The UK’s most powerful supercomputer starts hunting for medical breakthroughs

The news

Nvidia launched the UK’s most powerful supercomputer Cambridge-1, making it available to external researchers in the domestic healthcare industry. The machine will be used for AI research in healthcare, with the goal of making the process of preventing, diagnosing, and treating disease better, faster, and cheaper.

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 are using the supercomputer to develop a deeper understanding of brain diseases like dementia, applying AI to design new drugs, and to improve the accuracy of finding disease-causing variations in human genomes.

Our perspective

The fact that the supercomputer is located in the UK, and not in Silicon Valley, is no coincidence—but instead a consequence of the strong UK MedTech ecosystem. Particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, there is close collaboration among public entities, academic institutions, healthcare corporations, and startups. 

Big datasets help to fuel artificial intelligence. Thus, the publicly-funded UK Biobank is a relevant building block in the UK ecosystem. It is one of the richest biomedical databases in the world, containing in-depth genetic and health information from half a million UK participants.