AI and cancer vaccines
This article by Dr Lennard Lee is extracted from the current issue of Observatory magazine
Green Templeton College has always been a place where medicine, business and public service come together.
It has become a community of leaders from health, policy and enterprise. That ethos has never felt more relevant than today, as the UK steps into the AI age with massive national investment in supercomputing and a new prosperity partnership with the United States.
The UK is now home to sovereign AI supercomputing capacity, including the Dawn system at Cambridge, capable of training the most advanced models in the world. Across the country, researchers are turning this power towards the most pressing challenges in medicine. At Oxford, these ambitions are being channelled into a flagship national initiative that I am spearheading at the Nuffield Department of Medicine – using supercomputing to design the next generation of cancer vaccines.
The project builds on three great strengths of British science: genomics, vaccines and artificial intelligence. Genomics provided the ability to decode life at its most fundamental level. Vaccines showed how science can be mobilised to protect lives, with Oxford leading during the COVID-19 pandemic. AI now brings these insights together at speed and scale, creating models that can predict which elements of a tumour can be turned into therapies.
Green Templeton is a natural home for me as I undertake this work. Its culture of interdisciplinarity encourages collaboration between doctors, scientists, entrepreneurs and policymakers. One of the college’s founding missions – to link medicine with the wider world – resonates strongly in this new landscape of AI-powered health innovation.
I have previously led national flagship initiatives, including the UK pandemic lateral flow moonshot, the UK Coronavirus Cancer Monitoring Project, and the NHS-Galleri study, which recruited 140,000 people in one year to test a new blood test for 50 types of cancer.
Learning how to use sovereign AI supercomputers, uploading a generative pretrained transformer (GPT), then training and deploying it has been a challenge that required bravery even to attempt. Oxford, including through the college, has the chance to lead in this space. These are skills that any future student may one day learn, and it is a privilege to be a pioneer at the start of this journey.
The UK government’s commitment to AI supercomputing and its deal with the US are positioning Britain as a leader in the industries of the future. Cancer vaccines designed through AI promise better outcomes for patients and represent the potential birth of a new era in healthcare, creating opportunities for innovation and growth. Most importantly – faster patient impact.
For the college, the arrival of these technologies is a chance to extend its founding mission at the forefront of innovation – linking medicine with business, science with policy, and research with real-world impact. Together, we are entering the AI age with purpose, ready to play our part in one of the most ambitious international endeavours of our time.
Dr Lennard Lee is a Research Fellow at college, Associate Professor at the Nuffield Department of Medicine and Chief Medical Officer of the Clinic at the Ellison Institute of Technology.
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