The project, ‘A foundation model for cancer vaccine design’, has been selected for an award by the highly prestigious UK Government’s AI Research Resource (AIRR) initiative, led by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The project will receive 10,000 GPU hours on the Dawn Supercomputer, one of the fastest artificial intelligence supercomputers in the UK.
Dr Lennard Lee, Associate Professor at the Centre for Immuno-Oncology and co-lead for the project, said: ‘We believe Oxford can lead a new era of discovery in cancer care - making treatments safer, more precise and more effective through use of cutting-edge technologies. Cancer vaccine design faces one of the greatest bottlenecks in development: access to high-performance compute infrastructure. With one of the UK’s fastest AI supercomputers now available to us, discoveries that once took years could now take just weeks.’
Michael Bryan, a CRUK MB-PhD Fellow and DPhil Student at the Centre for Immuno-Oncology, said: ‘It’s a real privilege to be working at Oxford with the support of Cancer Research UK. Our team is developing our own specialised AI foundation models to accelerate the discovery of targets for life-saving cancer vaccines.’
The project, delivered by the Nuffield Department of Medicine, will leverage publicly available tumour datasets to make discoveries across multiple cancer subtypes and contribute to the Oxford Neoantigen Atlas – an open-access platform supporting cancer vaccine research across the UK.
This work forms part of a broader national effort to accelerate the UK’s scientific capabilities, transformed by access to AI supercomputing power, to usher in a new era of immunology and vaccine discovery.
The AIRR programme, led by DSIT and UKRI, is investing over £1 billion to scale national compute capacity by 20-fold by 2030 – enabling bold, data-driven research across public and private sectors. This award aligns Oxford’s scientists with the government’s ambition to make Britain a global leader in AI, science and healthcare innovation.