Google AI helps discover potential cancer therapy pathway: Sundar Pichai shares ‘exciting milestone’

Sundar Pichai shared that Google DeepMind researchers developed the potential cancer therapy pathway in collaboration with Yale University.

Sundar Pichai announced an “exciting milestone” regarding DeepMind’s Gemma, an AI model that helped discover a new potential cancer therapy pathway. The tech giant developed the new cancer-therapy hypothesis in a research collaboration with Yale University.

Sundar Pichai’s post on the Google AI model Gemma created a stir on X. (AFP)

“An exciting milestone for AI in science: Our C2S-Scale 27B foundation model, built with Yale and based on Gemma, generated a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behavior, which scientists experimentally validated in living cells,” the tech CEO tweeted.

“With more preclinical and clinical tests, this discovery may reveal a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer,” he added.

How did social media react?

The post, which has received millions of views, has prompted several responses from people. A former Google engineer wrote, “This is precisely where AI's biggest societal impact lies—accelerating breakthroughs in fundamental science like oncology. Moving beyond entertainment to directly aid the social good, as demonstrated by the C2S-Scale model and the Yale collaboration, is incredibly motivating. Looking forward to seeing how this validated hypothesis translates into real therapies!”

Another added, “To clarify: it’s a huge step in AI-for-science - instead of the regular AI we’re used to, this model is there for cell & molecular biology. 27B params is huge in the science context.” A third posted, “Hell yes! Call me crazy but fighting cancer is way more important than the goon slop being produced by the other frontier labs.”

A fourth remarked, “This is so special . As my father is fighting cancer, I feel there is so much need for AI resources to be devoted for developing therapies faster. Thank you Google.”

DeepMind researchers, in collaboration with Yale University, released a foundation model for single-cell analysis called Cell2Sentence-Scale 27B (C2S-Scale). In a blog post, the company wrote that the model generated "a novel hypothesis about cancer cellular behaviour" and that its predictions were confirmed with "experimental validation in living cells."

"This discovery reveals a promising new pathway for developing therapies to fight cancer."