Microsoft Claims That Its Biological Computation Unit Can Reprogram Diseased Cells

Microsoft says it is going to “solve” cancer in the next 10 years. The company is working at treating the disease like a computer virus that invades and corrupts the body’s cells. Once it is able to do so, it will be able to monitor for them and even potentially reprogram them to be healthy again. The company has built a “biological computation” unit whose ultimate aim is to make cells living computers. As such, they could be programmed to treat any disease, such as cancer. In the short term, the unit is using advanced research to try and set computers to work learning about drugs and diseases and suggesting new treatments to help cancer patients.

The team hopes to be able to use machine learning technologies – computers that can think and learn like humans – to read through the huge amounts of cancer research and come to understand the disease and the drugs that treat it. At the moment, so much cancer research is published that it is impossible for any doctor to read it all. But since computers can read and understand so much more quickly, the systems will be able to read through all of the research and then put that to work on specific situations. It does that by bringing together biology, maths and computing. Those have long been treated as relatively distinct but are coming closer in recent years, and have been spurred on by Microsoft’s investment.

The field of biology and the field of computation might seem like chalk and cheese but the complex processes that happen in cells have some similarity to those that happens in a standard desktop computer. As such, those complex processes can potentially be understood by a desktop computer, too. And those same computers could be used to understand how cells behave and to treat them. If that were possible, then those computers won’t only be able to understand why cells behave as they do and when they might be about to become cancerous, but also trigger a response within a cell, reversing its decision and reprogramming it so that it is healthy again. Microsoft says that solution could be with us within the next five to ten years.