Visual computing tech company NVIDIA announced last Monday that it’s teaming up with the National Cancer Institute, the US Department of Energy (DOE), and several national laboratories on the Cancer Moonshot initiative, which aims to accelerate cancer research.

The initiative, launched earlier this year by President Barack Obama, seeks to deliver a decade of advances in cancer prevention, diagnosis, and treatment in only five years, and it does this with the help of AI. The initiative includes building an AI framework called CANDLE (Cancer Distributed Learning Environment) that would provide a common discovery platform using the power of AI. NVIDIA’s computational scientists and engineers will contribute to building this framework.

“AI will be essential to achieve the objectives of the Cancer Moonshot,” according to Rick Stevens, associate laboratory director for Computing, Environment and Life Sciences at the Argonne National Laboratory. “New computing architectures have accelerated the training of neural networks by 50 times in just three years, and we expect more dramatic gains ahead.”

Though CANDLE will be the first AI framework made to change how we understand cancer, it certainly isn’t the first to bring AI into healthcare research. On the part of the government, there was also the Precision Medicine Initiative. Many other medical programs are beginning to use deep learning, probably the fastest growing field in AI.

AI is reshaping the way we do medical research for the better.