Microsoft’s researchers don’t talk about “curing” cancer. Instead, they are aiming to “solve” it.

The technology behemoth is best known for its operating systems and business software, and since 2014, under CEO Satya Nadella, it’s focused much of its energy on plotting a future for mainstay products such as Windows and Office. But the company has also quietly built up a presence in medical research. In Cambridge, U.K., it has 150 scientists and software developers working on a wide variety of projects at its little-known “biological computation” unit, which includes a newly installed wet lab. The company says its eventual goal is to make cells into living computers that could someday be programmed–and even reprogrammed–to treat diseases like cancer. In the near term, it is building computer-modeling tools to assist pharma companies in drug discovery and development.

Jasmin Fisher

The lab is positioning itself at the intersection of machine learning, computer-aided design, mathematics, and biology. For decades, these disciplines were relatively disparate, but that’s beginning to change with the advent of such fields as bioinformatics. Microsoft’s team specializes in biological modeling, a still-nascent branch of systems biology that involves using advanced computation to map the complex interactions at work inside a cell.

“The field of biology and the field of computation might seem like chalk and cheese,” says Chris Bishop, head of Microsoft Research’s Cambridge-based lab, using a Britishism to convey their obvious differences. “But the complex processes that happen in cells have some similarity to those that happen in a standard desktop computer.”

The emerging field of biological modeling caught the attention of the scientific community in 2012 when researchers at Stanford University developed the first complete computer model of an organism, the tiny parasite Mycoplasma genitalium. That research brought to light a problem that still plagues biologists: There is no shortage of cellular data drawn from experiments, but this data can’t be properly understood until it can be brought in one place. Microsoft’s senior researcher Jasmin Fisher describes this process as “connecting the puzzle pieces.”

Proponents of the field see potential for a variety of medical uses. In response to the Stanford development, National Institutes of Health director James M. Anderson described these kind of computational models of cells as having the “potential to advance our understanding of cellular function and, ultimately, to inform new approaches for the diagnosis and treatment of disease.”