Tokyo, 28 June, /AJMEDIA/
SoftBank Group Corp will start medical services in Japan that analyze gene information and other data with artificial intelligence, offering treatment proposals for cancer and other serious diseases.
The services, to start later this year, will be provided by establishing a joint venture with Tempus AI Inc, leveraging the U.S. company’s expertise and technology on AI-powered health care and its massive data libraries.
“We want to reduce the sorrow of death,” SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son said at a press conference in Tokyo, while revealing that he lost his father to cancer last year. “For that purpose, we will use the power of AI.”
The services will combine Tempus’ data of about 7.7 million cancer patients in the United States and information to be obtained through partnerships with hospitals in Japan for AI to analyze.
AI analysis will make it possible to offer treatments that are more tailored for individual patients, such as curbing side effects and improving drugs’ efficacy, according to SoftBank.
The services will initially focus on cancer, the biggest cause of death in Japan, and expand to other areas such as heart disease, the tech conglomerate said.
The 50-50 joint venture, SB Tempus Corp, will be launched with a capital of 30 billion yen, SoftBank said. It is slated to start operating in August.
The announcement comes after Son said at a shareholders’ meeting earlier this month that he will deepen collaboration with other firms to accelerate the evolution of AI. He predicted then that AI thousands of times smarter than humans will become a reality within the next 10 years and may come up with cures for cancer.
© KYODO
