AI and cancer: international conference organised by Columbia, BSC and CNIO to build the ‘new paradigm’ in cancer research

11 November 2024

The ‘AI meets cancer’ meeting includes some thirty leading researchers in the field, including Raúl Rabadán (Columbia University); Alfonso Valencia (BSC); and Maria A. Blasco (CNIO).

Artificial Intelligence is already helping to find new cancer therapies, to diagnose tumours earlier, to know who is most at risk of developing cancer. Leaders in the field claim that AI marks a paradigm shift. Indeed, the cancer research community is immersed in an accelerated training process to make the most of the new possibilities offered by the new tool.

The Spanish National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) is hosting a conference on AI and cancer organised by three leading international institutions: Columbia University (USA); the Barcelona Supercomputing Center – Centro Nacional de Supercomputación (BSC-CNS); and the CNIO itself.

At the conference, whose programme has been put together by leaders in the field such as Raúl Rabadán, Alfonso Valencia and Maria A. Blasco, some thirty researchers from Europe and the United States will present their work in the CNIO auditorium, which is full for the occasion.

Rabadán is a theoretical physicist trained at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid and now a computational biologist, at the head of the Mathematical Genomics programme at Columbia University (an unusual career that even took him to CERN, the European particle physics laboratory). Valencia heads the Life Sciences department at the BSC and is one of the pioneers of bioinformatics in Spain. Maria A. Blasco is director of the CNIO.

Some of the leading researchers in this area in Spain will take part, such as Joaquín Dopazo, from the Andalusian Platform for Computational Medicine, and Fátima Al-Shahrour, head of the CNIO Bioinformatics Unit. Groups from the universities of Vigo and Castilla La Mancha are also represented.