Is called Christened Cambridge-1 and it is the supercomputer most powerful currently installed in Great Britain, the result of the work of Nvidia which invested about 100 million dollars in the initiative. The project was born for scientific purposes, and was created specifically for the medical research: exploiting the computational capacity of the machine, big data and the latest artificial intelligence algorithms, the ultimate goal is to develop processes that prevent, diagnose and treat a whole series of diseases in a faster (and cheaper) way.
The first projects will be carried out in collaboration with pharmaceutical companies and institutions such as AstraZeneca, GSK, Guy’s and St Thomas Foundation, King’s College and Oxford. Studies will range from pathologies such as senile dementia to the creation of new drugs and the analysis of genetic diseases.
The Guardian, which reported the news, cited the example of oncological pathologies: in many cases, patients are given medicines that damage the patient’s immune system in an attempt to fight cancer, but the effects are not always as expected and being able to analyze huge amounts of data and create predictive models could greatly improve the choice of the prescribed treatments.
The use of supercomputers to study diseases and find possible cures is promising because usually drug research is expensive, time-consuming and the success rate is quite low on the total number of attempts made, so the computing power of machines like Christened Cambridge-1 and those to come in the future could help researchers.