Microsoft today announced a new partnership with the Seattle-based company, Adaptive Biotechnologies. The two companies will be working together and combining the latest advances in AI and machine learning in order to build a technology to help map and decode the human immune system. According to Microsoft, it all boils down to one common goal, creating a “universal blood test that reads a person’s immune system to detect a wide variety of diseases.”
The Redmond giant deeply believes in the potential of the partnership and mentions that they have made a “substantial financial investment” in Adaptive Biotechnologies. Top researchers at Microsoft are also already working with scientists at Adaptive Biotechnologies, using sequencing technology and Microsoft machine learning and cloud to help make the universal blood test a reality.
Microsoft expanded on this in a press release:
We’re incredibly excited to collaborate on this project with our partners at Adaptive, who have developed unique immunosequencing capabilities and immune system knowledge, along with very large data sets of TCR sequences. Classifying and mapping this data represents a large-scale machine learning project for which we’ll lean heavily on Microsoft’s cloud computing capabilities and our elite research teams.
We know this partnership and the resulting work represent a big challenge. But we believe in the impact technology can have in healthcare, specifically how AI, the cloud and collaboration with our partners can come together and transform what is possible.
You can learn more about the scientific technicalities of the partnership by checking here. It’s all a part of Microsoft’s Healthcare NExT program, which helps empower those in the science and healthcare fields to accelerate the diagnosis and treatment of autoimmune disorders, cancer, and infectious disease.
