The multi-million-dollar project marks the start of a multiyear partnership.
Silicon Valley startup Cerebras Systems just secured itself a big partner, the Mayo Clinic. The two have teamed up to develop large scale AI models to implement in the healthcare system.
Cerebras will provide the Mayo Clinic with clinical use computing chips and specialized systems to utilize decades of anonymized medical records and patient data, including diagnostics, treatments, outcomes, imaging, and molecular research to develop its own AI models.
“To create the first truly patient-centric healthcare AI, Mayo Clinic selected Cerebras for its proven experience in designing and training large-scale, domain-specific generative AI models,” the company wrote on its LinkedIn page. “Together, Cerebras and Mayo Clinic seek to combine AI and domain expertise to produce better patient outcomes.”
According to a report from Reuters, Matthew Callstrom, medical director for strategy and chair of its radiology department at the Mayo Clinic, said that these new models will be able to summarize important parts of extensive medical records; others will be trained to look for patterns over thousands of medical images or analyze genome data. However, Mayo made it clear that human doctors will still be the ones making all medical decisions.
Cerebras CEO and co-founder Andrew Feldman said on the Cerebras Systems website: “[...] we are uniquely positioned to combine AI and medicine. The state-of-the-art AI models we are developing together will work alongside doctors to help with patient diagnosis, treatment planning, and outcome estimation.”
Cerebras grew to fame for their giant wafer-scale chips. With 2.6 trillion transistors, its Wafer Scale Engine 2 is the largest semiconductor in the world.
Dhiraj Mallick, Cerebras Systems Chief Operating Officer, wrote on the company’s LinkedIn about the new team’s first project: “The first deliverable of the partnership is a Rheumatoid Arthritis diagnostic model, which will combine data from patient records, DNA and drug molecules to help match RA patients with the best therapeutics to manage their disease.”
Mallick went on to say that Mayo and Cerebras plan to develop a similar model for pancreatic cancer, which is the fourth leading cause of cancer death in both men and women, taking nearly a half million lives globally in 2020.
This isn’t Cerebras Systems first (healthcare) rodeo either.
In May of 2022, Cerebras CS-2 system was used by biopharmaceutical company AbbVie to train biomedical natural language processing models. The company is one of several AI chip startups looking to challenge market leader Nvidia (NVDA.O). Cerebras will provide the Mayo Clinic with both hardware and software under the new deal.
Cerebras is one of few AI hardware startups to secure large customers like the Mayo Clinic. The company is set to generate something close to a billion dollars in revenue.
As for the cost, Callstrom said the Mayo Clinic is undecided on how much it will charge for the new technology. However, multiple outlets have reported that this is a multi-million-dollar partnership.
Marie DeFreitas is the finance editor for HealthLeaders.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
The Mayo Clinic has chosen Cerebras Systems as their newest partner to develop large-scale AI models using computing chips and specialized systems that hope to aid in better patient outcomes.
Cerebras System is uniquely positioned to secure AI’s role in healthcare with a big-name partner like the Mayo Clinic.
The new partnership is expected to be a multi-million-dollar deal.