Two researchers at UC San Diego are among members of a dozen teams selected as finalists in an international cancer competition that could net the winner up to $25 million.<\/p>\n
Cancer Grand Challenges is a global research initiative made possible through a collaboration between Cancer Research UK<\/a> and the U.S. National Cancer Institute<\/a>. Thus far, the effort has contributed $400 million to 16 teams and engaged 1,200 investigators or contributors across the world.<\/p>\n From a record pool of 227 submissions, 12 teams were shortlisted as finalists for prizes this year. Winners will be announced in March at the Cancer Grand Challenges Summit in London.<\/p>\n Their projects seek to prevent, detect or treat cancer in six categories:<\/p>\n \u2022 Human and artificial intelligence collaborations<\/p>\n \u2022 Cancer avoidance<\/p>\n \u2022 The dark proteome<\/p>\n \u2022 Mechanisms driving mutational signatures<\/p>\n \u2022 The nervous system and cancer<\/p>\n \u2022 Rewiring cancer cells<\/p>\n Competing in the mutational signatures\u00a0category is team CAUSE, led by Ludmil Alexandrov, a professor of cellular and molecular medicine and bioengineering at UCSD. Other collaborators on the team hail from the United States, Netherlands and United Kingdom.<\/p>\n This isn\u2019t Alexandrov\u2019s first shot at the competition. In 2017, when it was named the CRUK Grand Challenge, he was a collaborator for Mutographs, a team that analyzed \u201cfingerprints\u201d of environmental factors such as pollution or smoke that become etched on DNA of healthy and cancerous cells.<\/p>\n As one of that year\u2019s winners, the team went on to conduct a global study on mutational signatures.<\/p>\n Now, Alexandrov and team CAUSE are focusing on understanding the basic molecular mechanisms that give rise to mutations, including those associated with aging, which Alexandrov says is the biggest risk factor for cancer.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we can understand these underlying mechanisms, the presumption there is that we can intervene and we can actually prevent cancer more effectively,\u201d Alexandrov said.<\/p>\n Also vying for the top prize is Biologia Ex Machina, a team developing AI-driven \u201cco-scientists\u201d to aid human scientists in their cancer research.<\/p>\n Trey Ideker, a professor of medicine, bioengineering and computer science at UCSD, is a co-investigator for the team and is joined by peers from Spain, Switzerland, the U.S. and the U.K. Marinka Zitnik of Harvard Medical School is the team lead.<\/p>\n Following the public release in 2020 of GPT-3, a large language model from OpenAI, the team has \u201crigorously tested and controlled\u201d LLMs, Ideker said.<\/p>\n The models\u2019 ability to read all relevant literature and training shows significant promise for the technology, he added.<\/p>\n \u201cAlthough there was, I think, a lot of appropriate concern about hallucination \u2014 that these things just kind of start making things up \u2014 for as many times as you worry, you also see inspired ideas out of these things and for what could be the underlying explanation of all your observations,\u201d Ideker said.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd you see it not just anecdotally. You see that time and time and time again these things are coming up with hypotheses that had a human thought it up, you\u2019d think the human is brilliant.\u201d<\/p>\n If Biologia Ex Machina gets the multimillion-dollar prize, it would do two things, Ideker said: hire a machine learning and software development team to use and push the technology ahead, and pursue experimental biology that the technology can help drive.<\/p>\n The ultimate question, he said, is whether computers will conduct all science a decade from now.<\/p>\n \u201cThe more I use these things and realize it\u2019s doing a better job than I am at formulating deep hypotheses about cancer and underlying biological phenomena that drive cancer \u2026 I think it\u2019s plausible that as a result of this Grand Challenges project, at the end of four or five years, we will have a system that\u2019s basically posing and testing thousands of hypotheses every month,\u201d Ideker said.\u00a0\u201cIf you can do that, you\u2019ve utterly changed the face of all of science.\u201d<\/p>\n