Google's AI Breakthrough: A New Frontier in Cancer Treatment

Google and Yale's new AI just made a major cancer discovery

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. The big picture: An AI model jointly developed by Google and Yale University has produced a groundbreaking hypothesis about how cancer cells interact with the human immune system. Researchers believe the discovery could represent one of the most significant breakthroughs in cancer therapy to date and has the potential to transform how the disease is treated in the future. The hypothesis was generated by a 27-billion-parameter foundation model called Cell2Sentence-Scale 27B (C2S-Scale), developed by researchers at Google DeepMind and Yale University. Built on Google's open-source Gemma AI model, C2S-Scale is designed for single-cell analysis, enabling researchers to predict the behavior of cancer cells within living organisms. Clinical validation has confirmed the model's predictions, potentially paving the way for more effective cancer therapies. The discovery builds on Google's earlier research, which showed that biological AI models follow clear scaling laws: larger models exhibit higher levels of conditional reasoning, similar to the behavior of natural language AI systems. According to Google, the C2S-Scale 27B model can interpret the "language" of individual living cells, allowing it to transform hard-to-detect "cold" tumors into "hot" tumors. This process makes malignant cells more visible to the immune system and more responsive to therapy. The new AI model also successfully identified a conditional amplifier drug capable of boosting the body's immune signal in specific contexts - for example, when the immune-signaling protein interferon fails to induce antigen presentation on its own due to insufficient levels. This capability was not observed in smaller AI models tasked with similar challenges. Explaining how C2S-Scale was trained to reason through complex biological conditions, Google stated that its researchers designed a so-called "dual-context virtual screen," simulating the effects of more than 4,000 drugs across real-world patient tumor samples and isolated cell line data without any immune context. When asked to identify drugs that could selectively enhance antigen presentation in the first context, the model highlighted several candidates - only 10 - 30 percent of which were previously known to be effective in cancer treatment. The remaining predictions had no prior known link to the screen or to cancer immunotherapy. These predictions were subsequently validated in clinical applications. Both Gemma and C2S-Scale 27B are publicly available on Hugging Face and GitHub. Google has also posted a scientific preprint on bioRxiv to assist researchers in running virtual drug screens capable of uncovering potentially life-saving hypotheses. Researchers caution, however, that all predictions will require peer review and clinical validation before being adopted for therapeutic use.

'Milestone': Google AI reveals new method to make tumors treatable

The finding opens a promising new pathway for developing advanced cancer therapies. It marked a major milestone in the use of AI for biomedical research. The model was built to understand the "language" of individual cells, allowing it to analyze complex single-cell data. One of the toughest challenges in cancer immunotherapy is dealing with "cold" tumors, which escape detection by the immune system. DeepMind's model was designed to identify a drug that could selectively boost immune responses only under specific biological conditions. Unlike smaller AI systems, this model demonstrated the ability to reason through these complex biological contexts. To test its capabilities, the AI screened more than 4,000 drugs across various patient samples. It predicted that a drug called silmitasertib could enhance immune signaling, particularly when combined with low doses of interferon. Experiments confirmed the prediction. Neither silmitasertib nor interferon alone had strong effects. But together, they increased antigen presentation by about 50%. This made previously unresponsive tumors more detectable to the immune system, effectively turning "cold" tumors "hot."

This potential Google AI cancer treatment breakthrough could be AI's moonshot moment

Google Gemma may have done what cancer researchers could not Where were you when AI discovered a potential new treatment for cancer? I was at my desk, writing this story. The news, announced by Google this week, October 15, is in a way delivering on a promise that AI would someday solve the world's biggest problems. It's the kind of pie-in-the-sky statement that tends to get under people's skin. AI is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It's not even one thing. AI is many different generative models handling all sorts of tasks. What they tend to have in common is their size and their ability to solve problems based on that size. New research coming out of a collaboration between Google and Yale University claims that a new 27-billion-parameter foundation Gemma model (C2S-Scale 27B) designed to understand human cells, developed "a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior," which was then confirmed by the team. The discovery could lead to new cancer treatments. At the heart of the discovery is a problem that, up to now, no human cancer researcher could solve: how to make "cold" or hidden cancer cells show themselves. The task put before the AI model was creating a drug that could act as a "conditional amplifier." While smaller models failed on this task, the giant C2S-Scale 27B model did not, with it looking at 4,000 drugs and predicting which ones would boost antigen presentation. The model identified both drugs that are known to possess these capabilities and "surprising hits" for drugs they did not know could possess this capability. The paper notes that the researchers then validated the hypothesis with real-world tests in which they tested a combination of interferon and the identified drug (silmitasertib). As predicted by the Gemma AI model, the dosage increased antigen presentation and made the "cold" tumor more visible. I know. That's a lot, and I gave you the Cliff Notes version. But think of it this way: many late-stage cancers are not diagnosed, including prostate and breast cancer, because of cold tumors, in which there aren't enough T-cells present for a diagnosis until the cancer is far advanced and harder to treat. This breakthrough could lead to much earlier diagnosis, and that could save lives. All that makes this discovery exciting, but that's not necessarily my point. It's this moment where the true promise of AI is, if not realized, glimpsed. Conversations about the pros and cons of AI are pretty common these days, with many people sharing an uncomfortable mix of excitement and fear. AI is a fun and useful tool for quickly ideating, summarizing, and even creating, but it's also a massive disruptor. Jobs are changing because of AI (some are disappearing). Professionals in every walk of life use it casually and with real purpose. Doctors might quickly turn to, say, Gemini, for more ideas on a diagnosis. Artists will rough out an idea. Filmmakers might make a low-resolution movie of a scene. There are endless possibilities and just as many questions about where this is all going. However, the idea that AI could be something more than our assistant and plaything has always been part of the narrative. It's just that we never saw any evidence of it, say, helping solve world hunger, the climate crisis, or international conflict. Now, though, we have proof, perhaps, that it has at least the potential to do big, important things that matter to humanity. That's a moonshot moment if I ever saw one. I hope there's more to come.

Cancer cure using AI: Google's DeepMind AI makes breakthrough in cancer treatment research, turning 'cold' tumors 'hot'

Google DeepMind's artificial intelligence has discovered a new way to fight cancer. The AI model, Cell2Sentence-Scale 27B, identified a drug that can make 'cold' tumors more visible to the immune system. This discovery was confirmed through experiments with living cells. This breakthrough offers a promising new path for developing advanced cancer therapies. Google DeepMind announced on Wednesday, October 15 that its latest biological artificial intelligence system has generated and experimentally confirmed a new hypothesis for cancer treatment. The company described the result as "a milestone for AI in science." "With more preclinical and clinical tests, this discovery may reveal a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer," Google CEO Sundar Pichai tweeted. Google DeepMind and Yale University revealed that their AI model, Cell2Sentence-Scale 27B (C2S-Scale 27B), has achieved the groundbreaking scientific result. The 27-billion-parameter foundation model, part of Google's open-source Gemma family, generated a new hypothesis about how cancer cells behave, an idea later confirmed in real-world experiments using living cells. According to DeepMind, the finding opens a new pathway for developing advanced cancer therapies and represents a major milestone in the use of AI for biomedical research. "This discovery reveals a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer," as per the announcement. The model was designed to understand the "language" of individual cells and can analyze complex single-cell data. One of the biggest challenges in cancer immunotherapy is dealing with "cold" tumors, which evade detection by the immune system. Researchers developed the foundation model to analyze patient tumor data and simulate how different drugs might influence immune visibility. The model was able to generate "a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior and we have since confirmed its prediction with experimental validation in living cells. This discovery reveals a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer," DeepMind wrote in a blog post. The discovery focused on how to make "cold" tumors more "hot," or responsive to immune treatment. DeepMind said the model successfully identified a conditional amplifier drug that could boost immune visibility only in specific biological contexts. To test the idea, C2S-Scale analyzed patient tumor data and simulated the effects of more than 4,000 drug candidates. It predicted that silmitasertib (CX-4945), a kinase CK2 inhibitor, would significantly increase antigen presentation, a key immune trigger, but only in immune-active conditions. "What made this prediction so exciting was that it was a novel idea," Google wrote. "Although CK2 has been implicated in many cellular functions, including as a modulator of the immune system, inhibiting CK2 via silmitasertib has not been reported in the literature to explicitly enhance MHC-I expression or antigen presentation. This highlights that the model was generating a new, testable hypothesis and not just repeating known facts." Tumors are often described as "cold" or "hot" depending on how actively the immune system interacts with them. Cold tumors have few immune cells, known as tumor-infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), within their environment. They tend to evade immune detection due to weak antigen presentation and low immunogenicity, making them less responsive to immunotherapy, according to a review published in ScienceDirect titled "Transforming the 'cold' tumors to 'hot' tumors: strategies for immune activation." In contrast, hot tumors are rich in immune cell infiltration and show stronger immune activity. These tumors are more easily recognized by the immune system and typically respond better to immunotherapeutic treatments. Laboratory experiments confirmed the prediction. When human neuroendocrine cells were treated with both silmitasertib and low-dose interferon, antigen presentation rose by roughly 50 percent, making the tumor cells more visible to the immune system. DeepMind researchers described the finding as proof that scaling up biological AI models can lead to entirely new scientific hypotheses. "The true promise of scaling lies in the creation of new ideas, and the discovery of the unknown," the post said. Yale teams are now exploring the mechanism behind this immune effect and testing other AI-generated predictions. DeepMind said the work "provides a blueprint for a new kind of biological discovery," one that uses large-scale AI to run virtual drug screens and propose biologically grounded hypotheses for laboratory testing.

Google AI Generates Cancer Cell Hypothesis Validated in Human Cells

C2S-Scale 27B AI Model Decodes Cellular Language, Predicts Cancer Therapy Pathways Google's C2S-Scale 27B foundation model, developed in partnership with Yale University and based on the Gemma framework, has predicted a new hypothesis of cancer cell behavior. Interestingly, the hypothesis was also verified experimentally in living human cells. Google CEO Sundar Pichai referred to the AI-assisted laboratory science milestone as a monumental breakthrough. He pointed out that this landmark can influence both preclinical and clinical research, and potentially open up new therapeutic avenues in the future.

Google's Gemma model helps discover potential cancer therapy pathway By Investing.com

Investing.com -- Google announced a breakthrough in cancer research on Wednesday with the release of Cell2Sentence-Scale 27B (C2S-Scale), a 27 billion parameter foundation model designed to understand cellular language. Built on Google's Gemma family of open models, C2S-Scale has successfully generated and experimentally validated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior, revealing a promising new pathway for developing cancer therapies. The model identified silmitasertib (CX-4945), a kinase CK2 inhibitor, as a potential treatment that could enhance antigen presentation in tumors with low-level interferon signaling. This discovery could help make "cold" tumors (those invisible to the immune system) more visible and potentially responsive to immunotherapy. Laboratory tests confirmed the model's prediction, showing that combining silmitasertib with low-dose interferon produced a synergistic amplification of antigen presentation, increasing it by approximately 50% in human neuroendocrine cell models. "This discovery reveals a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer," Google stated in its announcement. The breakthrough demonstrates that larger AI models can acquire entirely new capabilities in biological research, not just improve at existing tasks. Google's research teams at Yale University are now exploring the mechanism further and testing additional AI-generated predictions in other immune contexts. The C2S-Scale 27B model and its resources have been made available to the research community, potentially accelerating the path to new cancer therapies through further preclinical and clinical validation. This article was generated with the support of AI and reviewed by an editor. For more information see our T&C.