NEW YORK – The Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and Fujitsu on Wednesday said they plan to sign a collaborative agreement to create artificial intelligence tools for precision medicine.
The joint research, which will kick off in May, will focus on developing AI that derives insights from patient data — including medical records, genomics, and imaging data — and integrating BSC's expertise in natural language processing with Tokyo-based technology firm Fujitsu's research in genomics and AI. The partners said that another goal of their alliance will be to develop digital twins in biomedicine derived from those sources for models of biological processes and cellular interactions.
AI can analyze large swaths of data to improve disease detection and save clinicians' time, according to the companies.
"This dual agreement with Fujitsu, which is the culmination of years of mutual collaboration, allows us to advance research in two important areas such as personalized medicine and quantum computing," BSC Director Mateo Valero said in a statement. "We hope that this joint research will result in new technologies that can ultimately benefit society."
A second research project under the partnership, separate from the companies' precision medicine efforts, involves developing technologies to develop and test quantum algorithms.