Research suggests that many more women could benefit from targeted breast cancer treatments – we just need to find them.

Nvidia is launching the $100 million Cambridge-1, the most powerful supercomputer in the United Kingdom, and it is making it available to external researchers in the U.K. health care industry. The machine will be used for AI research in health care, and it's one of the world's fastest supercomputers. Nvidia will make it available to accelerate research in digital biology, genomics, and quantum computing. Nvidia is collaborating with AstraZeneca, maker of one of the COVID-19 vaccines, to fuel faster drug discoveries and creating a transformer-based generative AI model for chemical structures. Transformer-based neural network architectures, which have become available only in the last several years, allow researchers to leverage massive datasets using self-supervised training methods, avoiding the need for manually labeled examples during pre-training.

Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust has added a fourth surgical robot to to its collection in a bid to speed up cancer operations delayed by the pandemic. The new addition joins three 4th generation da Vinci surgical systems from manufacturer Intuitive which the trust already owns and with four machines, the trust now has the largest robotic programme in the UK currently. The new robot, which is on loan until the end of the year, will operate on NHS patients from the private floors of the Cancer Centre at Guy's as part of a collaboration with private healthcare provider, HCA Healthcare UK. The new delivery will help to clear a backlog of surgical procedures and it is also hoped it will lead to improved patient outcomes. The use of robots in surgery leads to increased operative precision which can mean less pain for patients, smaller scars and reduced hospital stays post-surgery.

Though it may sound like something from science fiction, brain zapping -- or neuro-electrostimulation, as it's known -- is already being used to treat a variety of ailments. Researchers at Boston University recently reported that zapping the brains of older people could restore their thinking powers to those of someone in their 20s. 'Neuro-electrostimulation makes sense because the brain is an organ that works by electrical impulses, and there are many different techniques that can alter the brain's electrical activity, possibly for a therapeutic effect,' says Dr Lucia Li, a neurologist and clinical lecturer at Imperial College London. The brain-zapping treatment can be given via caps, headbands, or electrodes stuck to the scalp or even implanted in the brain. In some types of treatment, such as electroconvulsive therapy, used to treat severe depression, brain zapping is so powerful, patients have to be anaesthetised in case they hurt themselves.

Robots have been used to carry out kidney transplants for the first time in the UK. The machines are controlled by surgeons but computers and precision motors allow greater accuracy, meaning much less painful damage to muscle. As a result, the man and woman who had the operations at Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust in London were able to recover using only paracetamol rather than morphine. Siobhan Morris, 42, who underwent the operation a week ago, had previously had a kidney transplant by traditional open surgery, but found the pain with the robotic method was'probably 80 per cent less'. 'I was amazed,' the mother-of-two from Kent told The Sunday Times.