Memorial Sloan Kettering partners with AWS to use AI in cancer research | ViVE 2025

Nashville – More health systems are looking at ways to utilize artificial intelligence in research, as evidenced by a new partnership between Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Amazon Web Services.

Dr. Anaeze Offodile II, the chief strategy officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering, said he's enthusiastic about the parntership with AWS to use AI for cancer research.

Memorial Sloan Kettering and AWS announced Monday that they are collaborating to utilize AI to spur advances in cancer research. They made the announcement at the ViVE digital health conference.

Memorial Sloan Kettering has been investigating cancer for more than a century, and the cancer center is aiming to tap AWS AI tools to help scour its data from decades of research. The partnership also includes investments to develop new technology and entice more startup companies to use AI to tackle cancer, the organizations said.

AWS tools will provide more knowledge from Memorial Sloan Kettering’s clinical data, imaging and de-identified genomic data. The organizations say they hope that AI-powered technology can yield more breakthroughs and make progress toward the development of more personalized treatments.

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Memorial Sloan Kettering will take advantage of AWS’ large language models to analyze vast amounts of data. The cancer center and AWS say that they are aiming to use that data to project how cancers change over time. Ultimately, they hope to eventually use the new knowledge and insights to improve patient care.

Dr. Anaeze Offodile II, the chief strategy officer of Memorial Sloan Kettering, said in a statement that the cancer center is enthusiastic about the partnership with AWS paying dividends.

“MSK's collaboration with AWS is rooted in our shared vision and commitment to accelerate the pace with which we ideate, create, and bring lifesaving innovations to cancer patients,” said Offodile, who serves as the “futurist” of the cancer center. “A critical enabler of this will be harnessing the scale and expertise of the larger Amazon organization to advance our processes and infrastructure related to AI, inclusive of large language models.”

Dave Levey, AWS vice president of worldwide public sector and healthcare and life sciences, also sees promise in the collaboration with the cancer center.

"Pairing MSK’s cancer research expertise and vast data resources from over a century of oncology care with AWS's advanced cloud and AI capabilities creates a powerful engine for innovation," Levy said in a statement.

"MSK and AWS have a shared vision for applying technology to improve patient care and experience, and we're excited about how this collaboration will accelerate patient-centered discovery and precision medicine for cancer,” Levy said.

The partnership also aims at amplifying Memorial Sloan Kettering’s Innovation Hub, which was founded in 2020. The cancer center and AWS will form a team that is focusing on innovations through AI. The hub will help spur startups focusing on cancer research and ways to help patients have a better experience in the hospital and in receiving care at home, the organizations said.

The cancer center and AWS also said they will work to utilize AI to speed up the development of cancer drugs. Memorial Sloan Kettering will use AWS’ “Drug Discovery Workbench” to screen millions of compounds in hopes of identifying new treatment options.

More hospitals and physicians are using AI in some form or another. Two out of three doctors say they’re using some AI tools in their practice, up from 38% two years ago, according to an American Medical Association survey released last week.