Cancer centers, Big Tech unite in AI push honored by Time

Jeff Leek, PhD, vice president and chief data officer at Seattle-based Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, was named to the 2025 Time100 AI list for his role in launching the Cancer AI Alliance. 

The initiative brings together leading cancer centers and technology companies to accelerate research through AI while protecting patient privacy.

“This is really a team effort,” Dr. Leek told Becker’s. “There’s leaders across multiple different organizations, both in the major technology companies that are helping us and the cancer centers who have helped drive this forward. I view this sort of honor as an on-behalf-of-the-team honor.”

The alliance was announced in October 2024 by Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (Boston), Johns Hopkins Medicine (Baltimore) and Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (New York City), in collaboration with technology partners such as AWS, Google, Deloitte, Microsoft, and Nvidia. Its goal is to build AI models across patient data without exchanging records between institutions.

“We wanted to be able to build AI for the future while protecting patient privacy and data security,” Dr. Leek said. “We decided that we would try to show a proof of concept one year later, October 1. Usually, these big institutional collaborations can take up to a decade, and we’re trying to do it all in one year.”

That rapid pace has required coordination across legal, privacy, security, technology and research teams. 

“There’s been this huge group of hundreds of people that have come together to enable us to build these models, and we’re going to be seeing the results on a very quick time scale,” Dr. Leek said.

A central feature of the Cancer AI Alliance is its ability to operate across multiple institutions and cloud providers. 

“The thing that’s been so exciting about [the alliance] is the intersection of all of these different groups that sometimes are competitive with each other,” Dr. Leek said. “But for this project, one of the people that helped us set it up says this great phrase: cancer is nonpartisan. And so people really put their differences and their competition behind.”

The collaboration is already being applied to difficult questions in oncology. 

“We’re going to use [the platform] to address big questions that our oncologists have, ranging from, how do bone metastases events happen after a metastasis in your body, to what are the biomarkers that will help us predict inhibitor therapies in brain cancers, to the kinds of problems that are thorny around who should get which immunotherapy,” Dr. Leek said.

The project’s origins stem from conversations between Fred Hutch leaders and board members with strong ties to the technology sector. 

“We wanted to do something on a national scale,” Dr. Leek said. “Really, what ended up happening is I called my friends who are chief data officers and data leaders at these cancer centers and said, ‘Do you want to try something like this on this kind of wild ride?’ And then our board members called their friends, who are the CEOs of these major tech companies, and said, ‘Do you want to try this together?’”

Looking ahead, Dr. Leek said he expects the alliance to expand quickly. 

“We’ve already had a ton of inbound interest from other technology partners who want to be part of [the Cancer AI Alliance], who can help us build out new components of our technology platform,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of interest inbound from other cancer centers and health systems who want to join. The federated model is really appealing, because everybody gets to keep their data sovereign.”

The ultimate aim, he said, is to give oncologists new tools to improve patient care. 

“This platform and what we’re building is hopefully going to enable a dramatic acceleration of that research across all of the different cancer centers involved,” Dr. Leek said. “Ultimately for us, we want to scale to as many cancer centers as want to be part of the network.”

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