Stopping breast cancer with help from artificial intelligence

The U.S. government wants to find out if artificial intelligence can help doctors diagnose and treat breast cancer more effectively. In an effort to find targeted treatments for particularly invasive types of breast cancer that don't respond well to existing drugs, the Department of Defense announced this week that it is enlisting the biopharma company Berg Health to use AI for drug discovery. The partnership supports the White House's Cancer Moonshot initiative to screen up to 250,000 patient samples in search of new biological indicators, or biomarkers, of the earliest signs of cancer. While the death rate from breast cancer has dropped steadily over the past two decades, it remains the second-biggest killer among cancers in U.S. women, according to the National Cancer Institute. Under the partnership, Berg will have access to the DoD's Clinical Breast Care Project, a bank of 13,600 samples of both healthy and diseased tissue from nearly 8,000 patients.