SwRI RESEARCHERS PART OF TWO COLLABORATIVE TEAMS AWARDED SAMF GRANTS

Collaborative teams that include Southwest Research Institute staff received two of six recently awarded San Antonio Medical Foundation (SAMF) bioscience grants. SwRI, in collaboration with UT Health San Antonio and University Health System, received a nearly $200,000 grant to develop machine learning algorithms for cancer detection. A team from SwRI, UT Health San Antonio, The University of Texas at San Antonio and Texas Biomedical Research Institute also received a grant of nearly $200,000 for its work to identify drug molecules that interfere with the entry of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, into human cells.

The team developing cancer detection algorithms is using artificial intelligence to improve the speed and accuracy of cancer diagnosis and treatment, leading to better outcomes for patients. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the training of computers to recognize patterns and make predictions.

Researchers will focus on follicular lymphoma, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and Philadelphia chromosome-negative myeloproliferative neoplasms, malignancies caused by mutated bone marrow stem cells. They are training an algorithm to quantify immune cells and proteins expressed by these cancer cells, eliminating the guesswork for pathologists and providing information about tumor characteristics to guide treatment.