Ai2 and Providence Swedish Cancer Institute partner to advance AI-assisted scientific discovery

The collaboration includes clinically meaningful research findings on lobular breast cancer, and a local deployment to enable next-gen discovery while keeping clinical data secure.

Today, Ai2 announced a new partnership with the Paul G. Allen Research Center (PARC) at Providence Swedish Cancer Institute to apply Ai2’s AI-powered scientific discovery platform, AutoDiscovery, across cancer research datasets.

This partnership represents an important milestone for AutoDiscovery as it moves beyond public research datasets into active cancer research programs at a leading oncology research center. It’s a particularly significant deployment given the high standard required for AI adoption in biomedical science, where every finding must be transparent, reproducible, and independently validated before informing future research. 

The decision to expand the collaboration builds on a new research paper authored by a joint team led by Providence researchers, Dr. Kelly Paulson of the Paul G. Allen Research Center and Dr. Sasha Stanton of the Earle A. Chiles Research Institute, and Ai2’s Senior Research Scientist Bodhisattwa Majumder. Working together, the team used AutoDiscovery to analyze one of the world's most extensively studied breast cancer datasets, uncovering a stronger immune signature in invasive lobular breast cancer than previously recognized. Subsequently, this finding was validated across an independent patient dataset and through laboratory analysis. 

The findings suggest that it may be possible for an entire class of breast cancer patients to benefit from immunotherapy, representing roughly 15% of breast cancers diagnosed in the US each year. The results also illustrate how AI-assisted hypothesis generation can help researchers uncover questions worthy of further investigation. 

Helping researchers navigate an era of scientific abundance