In yesterday’s blog by Peter Lee, Corporate VP of Microsoft’s AI + Research, a new partnership and a new venture of the company were revealed. Microsoft partners with Adaptive Biotechnologies with an aim to decode the immune system to provide the diagnosis to treat diseases.
It is universally known that our immune system is influential to the core of respective human health. The two companies, along with their AI and machine learning attributes, are on a mission to be more thorough in “reading” the influence that will be useful in diagnosis and treatments.
The joint goal is ‘simple to state but also incredibly ambitious,’ as Peter writes. It involves creating a ‘universal blood test’ that will provide details on the person’s immune system for detecting diseases like infections, autoimmune disorders, and even cancer at the earliest possible stages. This will make things easier for diagnosis and thusly, relevant treatments
Microsoft provided substantial investment in the Seattle-based Adaptive Biotechnologies and has already started research and development with the company’s scientists. Microsoft’s leading researchers are using Adaptive’s sequencing technology and their own cloud computing capabilities and machine learning aspects to make the immune system’s deep reading an obvious possibility.
Chad Robins, the CEO, and Co-founder of Adaptive said in a press release that their partnership with Microsoft couldn’t have come at a better timing than now, amid advancing scenarios in biotechnology and healthcare. The aim is to assist researchers and clinicians in gaining more insights into diseases that may ultimately lead to a ‘better understanding of overall human health.’
Microsoft’s joint venture with Adaptive is potential enough to provide openings for predictive medicine, one field that our science is presently unable to explore. Therefore, a universal blood test that can tell you about exposure and stimuli towards diseases is going to be revolutionary in healthcare and of course, biotechnology.
The descriptive blog suggests the two companies focus on creating a ‘universal map of the immune system’ that (we think) should get an acronym or something like that once it is embraced in the essence of reality.
Anyways, the project is the bedrock of Microsoft’s initiative Healthcare NExT which was launched in 2017 to expand on AI and cloud computing in the healthcare industry. Its aim is to ‘empower innovators and pair leading capabilities in life and computer sciences to dramatically accelerate disease diagnosis and treatment’.
Microsoft will further provide details at the coming JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, San Francisco on January 10. Both Lee and Robins will be speaking via a ‘fireside chat’ that will be starting at 5 pm PT. The session is called “Decoding the Human Immune System: A Closer Look at a Landmark Partnership.”
