Microsoft this week announced new progress in its genomics collaboration with the Bar Harbor, Maine-based Jackson Laboratory. WHY IT MATTERS Jackson Lab has been using artificial intelligence tools, developed as part of Microsoft's Project Hanover, to help manage the vast amount of genomic data needed to power its precision medicine initiatives. Specifically, the technology has helped the laboratory scale up its Clinical Knowledgebase, or CKB too – a vast searchable database that helps oncologists and other healthcare experts make detailed interpretations of complex sequencing and maintain troves of leading-edge insights – drawn from thousands of cancer research papers each day – to help drive personalized treatments. The machine learning technology, which is still evolving, is increasingly able to "read" complex medical and research documents – trained to highlight important and relevant information contained within them such as new insights into genetics, drugs and patient response. That mining of disparate knowledge sources means clinicians can save hours finding and curating relevant data, targeted to specific genomic profiles.

The architect of the new service is Dr. Freddy Abnousi, the head of the company's healthcare research, who was previously linked to an earlier skunkworks initiative that would collect anonymized hospital data and use a technique called "hashing" to match the data to individuals that exist in both data sets -- for research, according to CNBC reporting.