Can AI cure cancer? Empowering people with tech to fight disease

In a world where conversations about AI are often sceptical, the work underway at the Garvan Institute of Medical Research offers hope. For researchers working to understand cancer and other life-limiting illnesses, AI in healthcare is opening new ways to see patterns in disease, ask better questions, provide tailored treatments and imagine how a cure might be a real possibility on the horizon. 

Professor Sarah Kummerfeld, Chief Scientific Officer at the Institute notes the impact of AI in healthcare in a short space of time. "In the last couple of years, the shift and the changes in AI and what it can do have opened up whole new ways to think about medical research," Sarah says.

Those changes are being put to good use in the lab of Associate Professor Christine Chaffer, where she and her colleagues are working on solving some of the biggest challenges in cancer research.

"The problem that we're trying to solve with cancer research today is trying to stop it from coming back," Christine explains. 

Christine points to metastatic cancer, where cancer spreads from its original location to other parts of the body, as one of the most significant hurdles facing researchers today.

"Metastatic cancer is such a problem. We know that if a cancer does spread, the treatments today are not curative."