Japanese IT company Fujitsu is collaborating with Kyoto University on a two-year project to investigate the use of artificial intelligence in medicine.

The partners are focused on AI’s possibilities in accelerating the research and development of next-generation medicine, such as new approaches to diagnostics and drug discovery.

The work will be run from the newly-established Department of Medical Intelligent Systems within Kyoto University.

The medical information put to use will include cancer patient data and patient data from electronic medical records collected by Kyoto University Hospital.

The firms say that existing AI technology has yet to adequately integrated the huge volumes of data from sources such as electronic medical records, medical journals and genomic data.

“To put this data to use, it has become essential to develop AI for medicine through the close collaboration of researchers with a high degree of knowledge of the medical field with AI researchers and engineers,” Fujitsu said in a statement.

Meanwhile, last year saw an uptick in life sciences interest in applying AI to drug research, with the likes of Scotland’s Exscientia scoring deals with GSK, Evotec and Sanofi, and Lundbeck signing up with IBM Watson Health.

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