US-Based Mayo Clinic Partners Silicon Valley Startup to Develop AI Models for Medical Applications

As per the deal, Mayo will gain access to Cerebras’ computing chips and systems. In turn, Cerebras gets to use a vast trove of medical information.

US-Based non-profit medical centre, Mayo Clinic has joined hands with AI startup Cerebras Systems to develop Artificial Intelligence models for its medical applications. The Silicon Valley-based startup will collaborate with the clinic to develop large language models or LLM as part of the multi-year deal announced on Tuesday.

While both partners refrained from disclosing the exact deal amount, Cerebras hinted that it was a multi-million-dollar deal. The announcement came at the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.

The Mayo Clinic is the largest integrated health system across the US funds research and education in the medical field. It is home to one of the world’s most valuable health data. The deal allows Cerebras to tap into Mayo’s anonymised patient data to develop its own AI models.

Andrew Feldman, CEO and cofounder of Cerebras reacting to the development said, “It is an honor to collaborate with Mayo Clinic, the top-ranked hospital in the nation. With its recognized leadership in delivering medical outcomes, we are uniquely positioned to combine AI and medicine.” “The state-of-the-art AI models we are developing together will work alongside doctors to help with patient diagnosis, treatment planning, and outcome estimation.”

How Mayo Clinic & Cerebras Systems’ Will Work Together

As per the deal, Mayo will gain access to Cerebras’ computing chips and systems to develop health tuned AI models. In turn, Cerebras gets to use a vast trove of medical information including diagnostics, treatments, outcomes, imaging, and molecular research. Mayo Clinic will retain the ownership of the systems built. The model will also have open access to various healthcare systems in the US, Canada, Brazil, and Israel.

The first project under the collaboration will be developing a disease-specific diagnostic model for Rheumatoid Arthritis. A plan to develop a similar model for pancreatic cancer is also in the pipeline.

Popularly known for its Wafer Scale Engine, California based Cerebras systems builds supercomputers designed to develop AI applications for several industries, pitting it against giants like NVIDIA.

In the past, Cerebras collaborated with life sciences giant GSK for use of its technology in drug discovery and AbbVie to train biomedical natural language processing (NLP) models.It also partnered with a health network in the UAE. However, this is Cerebras’ first AI collaboration with a US-based health system.

Recently Developed AI Models for Medical Applications

Several companies are focusing on building Artificial Intelligence models for medical applications. For example, in December Google unveiled MedLM, a family of foundation models designed for healthcare industry use cases and available through Google Cloud.

Most recently, researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US in collaboration with the Hebrew University-Hadassah Medical School in Israel developed a risk evaluation model using artificial intelligence. The model could potentially predict which variants of SARS-CoV2 can bring a fresh wave of infection.

Recently, digital pathology company Paige developed an artificial intelligence-based application that can detect cancer from more than 17 different tissue types.

One of the world’s leading biotech companies, Amgen, is also in the process of building AI models on an NVIDIA platform. The AI model will be used to build a human diversity atlas for drug target and disease-specific biomarker discovery, providing vital diagnostics for monitoring disease progression and regression.

In September last year, Researchers at Moorfields Eye Hospital and UCL Institute of Ophthalmology unveiled an artificial intelligence (AI) system that potentially not only identifies sight-threatening eye diseases but also predicts general health, including heart attacks, stroke, and Parkinson's disease.