The Gates Foundation and OpenAI are launching a new partnership aimed at bringing artificial intelligence into frontline health care systems across Africa, starting with Rwanda.

The initiative, called Horizon1000, will deploy AI-powered tools to support primary health care workers in patient intake, triage, follow-up, referrals, and access to trusted medical information in local languages. The organizations said the effort is designed to augment — not replace — health workers, particularly in regions facing severe workforce shortages.

The Gates Foundation and OpenAI are committing up to $50 million in combined funding, technology, and technical support, with a goal of reaching 1,000 primary health clinics and surrounding communities by 2028. The tools will be aligned with national clinical guidelines and optimized for accuracy, privacy, and security, according to the organizations.

“I spend a lot of time thinking about how AI can help us address fundamental challenges like poverty, hunger, and disease,” Bill Gates wrote in a blog post. “One issue that I keep coming back to is making great health care accessible to all — and that’s why we’re partnering with OpenAI and African leaders and innovators on Horizon1000.”

In sub-Saharan Africa alone, health systems face a shortage of nearly six million workers — a gap Gates said cannot be closed through training alone.

“AI offers a powerful way to extend clinical capacity,” wrote the Microsoft co-founder.

The announcement comes during the World Economic Forum’s 2026 annual meeting, where Gates appeared alongside Rwanda’s Minister of ICT and Innovation and the head of the Global Fund to discuss how AI and other technologies could help reverse recent setbacks in global health outcomes.

OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, earlier this month rolled out ChatGPT Health as part of its foray into healthcare.

Other nonprofits are exploring ways to apply AI in healthcare. PATH, a Seattle-based global health nonprofit, has received funding from the Gates Foundation to support this work. That includes grants to develop diagnostics and other healthcare services targeting underserved populations in India, and funding to study the accuracy and safety of AI-enabled support for healthcare providers.

Previously: Gates Foundation will cut up to 500 positions by 2030 to help reach ‘ambitious goals’

Seattle-based Alpenglow Biosciences today announced a partnership with PathNet, a leading U.S. pathology laboratory, to help commercialize use of the startup’s 3D microscope technology in clinical settings. The effort aims to modernize critical diagnostic tests for prostate and bladder cancers.

The company also confirmed $250,000 in new funding from Mike Rice, former CEO of BioLife Solutions and an Alpenglow advisory board member.

Alpenglow, which spun out of the University of Washington in 2018, has developed tools for quickly creating multi-dimensional images from biological tissue samples and accurately analyzing the results.

The technology is already in use in academic research labs and pharmaceutical companies. The move into clinical applications serving patients requires additional rigor.

“People’s lives are depending on it,” CEO and co-founder Dr. Nick Reder said in an interview. “So there’s a lot more regulatory compliance and validation that needs to be done.”

Alpenglow has been collaborating with the international optics pioneer Zeiss to engineer the unique microscope hardware and analytics software needed for clinical use. PathNet will take the technology from that partnership and use it at its Little Rock, Ark., lab to develop and validate tools for cancer diagnoses.

Jason Camilletti, CEO of PathNet, praised Alpenglow’s “revolutionary 3D platform.” The new partnership, he added in a statement, can “modernize genitourinary cancer diagnostics for clinicians and patients across the country.”

Reder launched the company to solve problems he experienced as a medical resident in pathology at the University of Washington.

“I wasted hundreds, no thousand of hours of my time, sifting through the images and trying to make sense of them,” Reder said.

Alpenglow’s AI-trained algorithms, he said, can analyze biological samples “and then predict ‘this is your risk for metastasis,’ or ‘this is the likelihood that you’ll respond to a drug.’ And so it really adds a lot of value to the diagnostic workflow.”

The startup has 22 employees and raised approximately $10 million from investors. It has also received roughly $10 million in grant support.

Last year the company was awarded $2 million in federal funding to create a prostate cancer diagnostic tool alongside CorePlus, a pathology software company. Alpenglow is also part of a multi-institution, five-year project worth up to $21 million that launched as part of the Biden administration’s Cancer Moonshot. The effort is developing technology for identifying tumor margins during cancer surgeries.

Alpenglow has customers including GSK (formerly GlaxoSmithKline), InSight Biopharmaceuticals, dermatology companies and others.

The other co-founders are Jonathan Liu, an affiliate professor in the UW’s Department of Mechanical Engineering; Adam Glaser, now a senior scientist at the Allen Institute; and the UW’s Lawrence True.

Reder is pleased to reach this point of development with the company after so many years of work.

“Actually getting into the clinic this year and then hopefully regulatory approval next year and all these big landmarks, it’s really exciting,” he said. “That was always the goal.”

Desney Tan, who rose from researcher to corporate vice president and managing director of Microsoft Research, announced Monday that he’s leaving the company after 21 years.

Tan became known in part for research in “whole body computing,” physiological sensing, brain-computer interfaces and other novel forms of human-computer interaction. His work spanned areas including Windows multi-monitor functionality, handwriting recognition, motion tracking for Xbox Kinect, and the technology behind the Microsoft Band fitness tracker.

In more recent years, he shifted his focus to healthcare, for a time leading Microsoft Health Futures, the company’s health and life sciences “moonshot factory.” He oversaw major partnerships including Microsoft’s collaboration with Adaptive Biotechnologies.

“New year, new adventures,” Tan wrote on LinkedIn, adding that he’s “signing off with a heart full of gratitude and a deep sense of pride.” He thanked colleagues at Microsoft Research for “the warm home, the unwavering trust, and the inspired pursuit of impactful innovation.”

In a message to GeekWire, Tan said he’s intentionally keeping his options open, without anything concrete lined up yet, so he can experiment with a few different things. 

Beyond Microsoft, he serves on the boards of ResMed and the Washington Research Foundation, and advises startups including surgical navigation company Proprio and cognitive health startup NewDays. He’s also senior advisor and chief technologist at Seattle-based incubator IntuitiveX, and holds an affiliate faculty position at the University of Washington.

New research tied to the University of Washington School of Medicine adds to mounting concerns among educators about smartphone use in schools.

U.S. adolescents between the ages of 13–18 spend more than one hour per day on phones during school hours, with “addictive” social media apps accounting for the largest share of use, according to new research published in JAMA.

The findings add to the ongoing argument made by teachers, parents and policymakers that has led schools and districts around the country, including some in Seattle, to ban phones during school hours. 

The Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study tracked 640 teens whose parents consented to passive monitoring software on their Android smartphones from September 2022 to May 2024, according to UW Medicine.

• Adolescents spent an average of 1.16 hours per day on smartphones during school hours.
• Social media apps Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat accounted for most use, followed by YouTube and games.
• Older adolescents (16–18) and teens from lower-income households reported higher smartphone use than their peers.

“These apps are designed to be addictive,” said Dr. Dimitri Christakis, the paper’s senior author. “They deprive students of the opportunity to be fully engaged in class and to hone their social skills with classmates and teachers.”

Christakis is a professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine and practices at Seattle Children’s Hospital. 

Based on a national sample of students, the results build on findings published last year in JAMA Pediatrics. That study had fewer participants but also included iPhone users.

At least 32 states and the District of Columbia require school districts to ban or restrict students’ use of cell phones in schools. The effect of those policies “remains to be seen,” Christakis said.  

“To date they’ve been very poorly enforced, if at all. I think the U.S. has to recognize the generational implications of depriving children of opportunities to learn in school,” he added.

A majority of school districts in Washington state planned to have policies in place at the start of the school year last fall to limit students’ use of cellphones and other devices such as smart watches.

Seattle Public Schools has not issued a district-wide policy, though at least three public middle schools in the district have banned phones at school, and at least one high school prohibits their use during classes.

The UW’s Youth Advisory Board, a group of approximately 20 teens from Seattle-area schools, recently published its first memo tackling the contentious issue of phones in school. The memo weighs the pros and cons of phone bans and offers recommendations on how schools should draft and communicate their policies. 

Related:

• The kids have spoken: Teens’ holistic approach to school phone policies rivals adult rules
• The right call? A year after school’s phone ban, educators and parents love it, but kids aren’t so sure

Mitera Biosciences is taking a cue from one of nature’s most effective biological tricks: how a mother’s body avoids rejecting a fetus.

The Bellevue, Wash.-based startup is emerging from stealth with $1.75 million in funding and a mission to develop new therapeutics for autoimmune diseases and organ transplant rejection. The company’s approach centers on a specific protein naturally expressed by the placenta during pregnancy.

“Our focus is really going back to nature and the human maternal-fetal relationship,” said Kevin Chow, Mitera’s co-founder, CEO and president. The startup is “trying to leverage what our bodies do naturally to help us with our immuno-tolerance.”

The startup, which uses a Greek word for “mother,” hopes its therapeutics can eventually replace traditional immunosuppressing drugs. Existing medications often hobble a patients’ helpful immune response, leaving them vulnerable to infections and causing toxic side effects over long-term use.

‘Important agent to investigate’

Mitera is working to commercialize intellectual property being exclusively licensed from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

While the startup is keeping the specific protein’s identity under wraps, it confirmed it is produced in the thymus — a gland that’s active in the immune system — and the placenta.

The protein plays a dual role: it bolsters regulatory T (Treg) cells, which protect the body’s own tissues, while dampening effector T (Teff) cells, which lead the attack against perceived invaders.

Given the protein’s role with these essential immune system players, “we felt it would be an important agent to investigate as a potential therapeutic,” Dr. Stanley Jordan, Mitera’s co-founder and chief scientist, said via email.

Mitera’s leadership team

Mitera’s three co-founders are longtime biotech leaders or medical providers.

• Chow is a serial biotech entrepreneur who previously co-founded and led Vitaeris, which worked on a treatment for kidney transplant rejection and was acquired by CSL Behring. Chow also works part time with Incisive Genetics, a startup developing a delivery system for gene therapy treatments.
• Jordan is a 40-year veteran of nephrology and transplant immunology and the medical director of the Kidney Transplant Program at Cedars-Sinai.
• Dr. S. Ananth Karumanchi, co-founder and lead scientific advisor, has been at Cedars-Sinai since 2017 and conducts research in hypertension in pregnancy and cardiovascular disease associated with kidney disease.

Mitera currently has seven employees. It conducts lab work at Cedars-Sinai and Contract Research Organizations (CROs), while its headquarters are in Bellevue.

The startup’s initial funding was led by Cedars-Sinai and provided as a SAFE, or Simple Agreement for Future Equity that allows an investor to receive a stake in the business in the future.

The biology underlying Mitera’s pursuit is “really new,” Chow said. While there’s clear potential for treating transplant patients, the therapy “could be used for so many bigger, broader diseases out there,” he added. “And that’s really exciting.”

Xhuliano Brace quickly realized that venture capitalists weren’t going to write big checks for two under-30 founders pursuing what he describes as a “contrarian” approach to using AI to design new drugs.

So he’s making the bet himself.

After four years of working on AI projects at Amazon, Brace left the tech giant to self-fund his vision. Using personal savings and proceeds from online trading, he invested a six-figure sum into Rhizome Research, a Seattle-based startup developing made-to-order, small drug-like molecules.

After launching last year, the five-employee startup recently came out of stealth. In addition to CEO Brace, who has degrees in math, computer science and economics from the University at Albany, Rhizome’s leadership includes:

• Yiwen Wang, co-founder and chief scientist, who has a PhD in chemistry from Carnegie Mellon University.
• Gregory Sinenka, chief technologist, who is a physics PhD and worked at a European research center and Johnson & Johnson.
• John Proudfoot, a former U.S.-based director in the Medicinal Chemistry Department at Boehringer Ingelheim, is serving as a scientific advisor.

A different approach to drug discovery

Rather than working from existing molecule-building tools, Rhizome has built its own fine-tuned foundational model, named r1. The technology is a “graph neural network” and was trained on more than 800 million small drug-like molecules.

The approach is different from the popular RoseTTAFold model created by the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design, which at its core is based on the amino acids that build proteins.

The r1 model focuses on the atoms and bonds that make up a molecule and its topography. That’s where the graph idea comes in — the atoms are analogous to the points in a graph while the bonds are akin to its connecting lines.

The team aims to provide fragment-based drug discovery, creating small molecules optimized to bind to customer-specified targets. They will ensure each drug candidate can be synthesized efficiently in the lab and is suitable for patent protection.

Rhizome last week released ADAMS, an open-source, automated AI tool that uses natural language instructions for simulating the binding between biological molecules. It also plans to share MolSim, which is a physics-based simulation that uses advanced, free-energy calculations that predict how strongly a small molecule will bind to its target. MolSim won’t be open source.

Vision for a Seattle hub

Rhizome recently established partnerships with wet labs that can validate the real-world performance of the potential drugs it designs, and it’s exploring customer relationships.

Brace is operating out of Foundations, the Seattle-based startup community launched by entrepreneur and investor Aviel Ginzburg. Rhizome’s other employees are working remotely, but the plan is to bring folks to Washington.

“I really want to make Seattle kind of a hub for small molecule drug discovery,” Brace said.

He pointed to the Allen Institute, the Institute for Protein Design and other Seattle-area organizations as key players. The region is also home to a slate of related drug design startups that include Pauling.AI, Synthesize Bio and Xaira Therapeutics, which is based in San Francisco and has labs in Seattle.

Brace said he’s energized by the opportunity to work on a project that could have a meaningful impact on humanity and has no regrets in ponying up his own money for the effort. He’s bullish in general on the use of AI for designing molecules, whether for health care or fields such as materials science and advanced manufacturing.

“This is the most interesting problem space to be in,” Brace said.

A Seattle-area startup called Pauling.AI is harnessing artificial intelligence to automate the early steps that lead to the discovery of new drugs. The technology can complete tasks in a matter of weeks that previously required three to six months, said founder and CEO Javier Tordable.

Using AI to accelerate research timelines could ultimately spark an exponential increase in new treatments, proponents say.

“The dream of a lot of people in the field would be that, at some point, we’ll go from 30 or 40 new drugs approved every year to 300 or 400,” Tordable said, “and cure all sorts of diseases.”

Tordable launched his company in 2024 after a 16-year tenure at Google, most recently as the technical director of the company’s healthcare and life sciences initiatives. While he doesn’t have expertise in biology or chemistry, Tordable said he’s skilled at building tech tools that can perform complex tasks — such as those required to create new pharmaceuticals.

The startup operates on a “scientist-as-a-service” model, allowing researchers to outsource early steps in the drug discovery process to AI. The platform performs computational chemistry work, engineering drug candidates and modeling how they might interact with molecules and inhibitors within a cell.

The result is a curated list of small-molecule compounds that scientists can then move into a physical laboratory for testing as therapeutics. In the future, the startup would like to produce more complex compounds as drug candidates, such as antibodies.

To accomplish all of this, Pauling is building automation tools that engage with existing large language models and databases from numerous sources.

The startup has six employees who work remotely. Its leadership includes Chief Scientific Officer Oleksandr Savytskyi, a computational biologist who worked in academia in Ukraine and did research at the Mayo Clinic.

Pauling has secured an undisclosed amount of pre-seed funding from Flex Capital and angel investors. It currently serves less than a dozen customers, including several high-profile academic institutions, Tordable said.

The company joins a burgeoning field of AI-biotech ventures, with numerous Pacific Northwest startups: Variational AI in Vancouver, B.C.; Seattle-based Potato and Synthesize Bio; and Xaira Therapeutics, which is based in San Francisco and has labs in Seattle. Additionally, FutureHouse is a California nonprofit in this sphere.

Ultimately, Tordable hopes that by shrinking the time and cost of drug development, it will become economically feasible to tackle rare diseases that are typically not served by big pharma, providing overlooked patients with treatments and cures.

“The nice thing of working in this field is that we’re not necessarily doing it just for economic returns,” Tordable said. “There’s also an enormous benefit to humanity.”

In a remarkable pivot, Athira Pharma is shifting its primary focus from Alzheimer’s to oncology following a multi-year period marked by clinical failures and leadership turnover.

The Bothell, Wash.-based company announced today that it has licensed a Phase 3 breast cancer drug from Sermonix Pharmaceuticals, supported by $90 million in funding from a group of healthcare investment firms. It could land an additional $146 million if the research yields promising results.

Athira will simultaneously continue researching ATH-1105, its own drug candidate for treating ALS.

Athira President and CEO Mark Litton called the development “exciting and transformative news.”

“By securing rights to this late-stage program — while also advancing pATH-1105 for ALS — we are building a pipeline that we believe has the potential to change lives and create enduring value,” Litton said on LinkedIn. “We are honored to have the backing of some of the most respected biotechnology funds in the industry.”

Following the deal announcement, the company’s stock rose 70% to $7 per share.

Athira has been through a tumultuous few years:

• Its Alzheimer’s disease drug candidate, called fosgonimeton, stumbled and then failed a Phase 2/3 trial last year.
• That sank Athira’s stock price and triggered a layoff of 49 employees, or about 70% of its workforce in September 2024.
• In 2021, Athira CEO and President Leen Kawas resigned after it was confirmed she had altered images in scientific papers from her graduate studies that helped form the company’s foundation.

Details on the deal

Under today’s deal, Athira secures an exclusive license to develop and commercialize the breast cancer therapeutic for nations outside of Asia and select Middle Eastern countries. The drug, called lasofoxifene, is currently in a clinical trial that has enrolled over half of its target patient population, with initial results expected in mid-2027.

The agreement provides Sermonix with 5.5 million shares of Athira’s stock. The Seattle company has also committed to paying Sermonix up to $100 million plus limited royalties if certain commercial targets are reached.

Three lead investors are backing the research: New York’s Commodore Capital, biotech hedge fund Perceptive Advisors, and California-based TCGX. Additional participants are ADAR1, Blackstone Multi-Asset Investing, Kalehua Capital, Ligand Pharmaceuticals, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Spruce Street Capital and 9vc.

Athira raised $90 million by selling stock and warrants to investors, extending its cash runway into 2028. If investors choose to exercise those warrants in the future, the company could receive up to an additional $146 million to fund its clinical programs.

“We’re proud to support this evolution and excited by the opportunity to deliver meaningful impact for patients and shareholders alike,” said Joseph Edelman, founder and CEO of Perceptive Advisors, in a statement.

Regarding its own ALS drug candidate, Athira this year successfully completed Phase 1 safety trials, and plans to start Phase 2 trials early next year.

Seattle-based mental health startup Joon Care has been acquired by Handspring Health, a New York-based health tech company. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“The acquisition is a major step toward building the most clinically rigorous and digitally engaging platform for youth and family mental healthcare in the country,” said Sahil Choudhry, co-founder and CEO of New York-based Handspring, in a LinkedIn post.

Joon launched in 2019 to provide online care for teens and young adults, pairing digital tools with virtual therapy sessions. The company serves patients 13- to 26-years-old who need help with anxiety, depression, disordered eating, sexual and gender identity, academic problems and other challenges. The course of therapy typically runs 16 weeks. The company’s program emphasizes its use of evidence-based care strategies and patient assessments to track progress.

Joon spun out of Seattle’s Pioneer Square Labs (PSL) and raised an initial $3.5 million round in 2020. Two years ago, it announced an additional $6 million investment, which would provide two to three years of operations, CEO Emily Pesce said at the time.

Handspring said in a press release that it would be integrating the companies’ “expert teams,” but did not say if all of Joon’s employees would be retained. The company has roughly 50 employees, based on information on LinkedIn.

GeekWire reached out to Pesce and will update the story if we hear back.

Handspring launched in 2021 and has raised $18.2 million, according to PitchBook. It also provides virtual therapy and online support, serving a slightly larger demographic with patients from 8- to 29-years-old.

Both companies operate multi-state platforms. Joon is licensed to provide care in Washington, Oregon, California, Texas, New York, Delaware and Pennsylvania. Its treatment is covered by 16 insurance companies, according to its website, and includes national giants Aetna and UnitedHealthcare.

Joon also launched a partnership in 2023 with the City of Seattle to provide free care to clients who are referred to the startup through the city’s human services programs. The collaboration appears to be ongoing, and Handspring said it would continue serving families under Joon’s existing contracts with government agencies, as well as treatment covered by insurance companies.

Pesce was a finalist for Startup CEO of the Year at the 2023 GeekWire Awards.

Casera, a new healthcare technology startup in Seattle, is spinning out of Pioneer Square Labs with a unique approach to hospital operations: using “agentic AI” to automate the work of case managers and speed up patient flow.

The company is tackling a thorny problem in healthcare: unnecessary length of stay driven by operational friction. Delays in communication, payer authorization and discharge planning can add time to a patient’s stay — and thousands of dollars in expenses for hospitals each day, according to Casera.

The company’s software is built for case managers, who coordinate the operational steps required to move patients safely through the system.

Casera describes its product as a “Case Manager Digital Agent” that operates inside communication channels, watching for context and then triggering next steps — for example, following up on a pending prior authorization or making sure all tasks for a complex discharge have owners and due dates.

Casera’s system plugs into existing collaboration and communication tools, and helps identify “what needs to happen, who needs to be involved, and helps ensure it gets done,” according to CEO Neeraj Singh Bhavani, who previously started patient-flow startup Tagnos (acquired by Sonitor).

Bhavani sees the company’s main competition in vendors that have traditionally focused on patient flow and hospital capacity management, including Qventus, LeanTaaS and TeleTracking. But he said Casera is attacking a different layer of the problem by focusing on “getting things done versus telling what to do.”

“Not trying to be another legacy dashboard and analytics player,” he told GeekWire.

Casera is working with a design partners across major health systems in three states. It has not generated revenue.

Casera’s other co-founder is CTO Alex Levin, who previously started revenue intelligence company MD Clarity (acquired by private equity). A third early leader, Jhayne Pana, was previously an assistant nurse manager with MultiCare Health.

The company has raised $1 million from PSL and has less than ten employees. PSL previously spun out Kevala, a healthcare staffing software company that was acquired earlier this year.

“Tackling patient flow with automation is a massive opportunity, and a very good use case for multiple agentic applications,” T.A. McCann, managing director at Pioneer Square Labs, said in a statement. “It’s an area we know well and in addition to the clear market need, the opportunity to work with two, recently-exited founders was a huge bonus.”

Pacific Northwest tech and cancer researchers are publicly releasing an AI tool that can perform sophisticated tumor analysis in a fraction of the time and cost of existing methods, potentially making cutting-edge cancer insights available to far more patients.

The GigaTIME model uses artificial intelligence to virtually generate detailed immune system data from standard pathology slides — analysis that would normally require days of lab work and thousands of dollars per sample.

The breakthrough could accelerate the shift toward precision medicine, where treatments are tailored to each patient’s specific cancer biology, said Hoifung Poon, general manager of Microsoft Research’s Real-World Evidence program.

Traditional pathology slides show tumor and immune cells but offer limited insights into whether a patient’s immune system is actively fighting cancer. A more sophisticated technique called multiplex immunofluorescence (mIF) analysis peers closely into the tumor’s microenvironment, adding information about whether immune cells are working based on which proteins are present.

But mIF analysis “just for one sample, could easily take days and cost thousands of dollars,” Poon said, severely limiting its use in routine care.

GigaTIME bypasses that bottleneck by generating the information virtually by simply analyzing standard pathology slides.

“GigaTIME is about unlocking insights that were previously out of reach,” said Dr. Carlo Bifulco, chief medical officer of Providence Genomics and a medical director at the Providence Cancer Institute.

The project brings together researchers from Microsoft; Providence facilities in Renton, Wash., and Portland; and the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. They’re publishing a peer-reviewed study today in the journal Cell and releasing the tool online for free on Hugging Face, GitHub and Microsoft Foundry.

Last year the three institutions released GigaPath, a model for diagnosing cancer.

The initiatives are part of the Seattle-area’s growing efforts to integrate complex health datasets using AI to facilitate advances in medicine. The Allen Institute last month released the Brain Knowledge Platform for neuroscience research, while biotech startup Synthesize Bio has built tools for designing experiments and predicting their outcomes using publicly available data. And the Fred Hutch Cancer Center helped produce a privacy-protecting, data-sharing model through the Cancer AI Alliance.

The scale of the GigaTIME project is giant:

• Researchers trained the model on a Providence dataset of 40 million cells, pairing pathology slides with mIF data examining 21 different proteins.
• They applied GigaTIME to samples from 14,256 cancer patients across 51 hospitals and more than 1,000 clinics in the Providence system.
• The work produced a virtual population of approximately 300,000 mIF images that cover 24 cancer types and 306 cancer subtypes.

Poon has even bigger ambitions that include blending together data gleaned from cell and biopsy samples plus CT radiology reports, MRIs and other diagnostics to create a more holistic picture of a patient. These advanced models could potentially offer predictions about how a disease might progress or respond to treatment.

The new tools could one day help curb the massive costs and time associated with clinical trials by providing better insights for selecting drug candidates and designing studies.

The goal is making advanced cancer care both more effective and more widely accessible.

“I’m personally biased, but I think there can’t be a more exciting time than right now,” Poon said, pointing to the convergence of AI capabilities and digital medical records as “two really powerful forces.”

Authors of the paper “Multimodal AI generates virtual population for tumor microenvironment modeling” are Jeya Maria Jose Valanarasu, Hanwen Xu, Naoto Usuyama, Chanwoo Kim, Cliff Wong, Peniel Argaw, Racheli Ben Shimol, Angela Crabtree, Kevin Matlock, Alexandra Q. Bartlett, Jaspreet Bagga, Yu Gu, Sheng Zhang, Tristan Naumann, Bernard A. Fox, Bill Wright, Ari Robicsek, Brian Piening, Carlo Bifulco, Sheng Wang and Hoifung Poon.