Oxford researchers win UK government AI supercomputing award to further cancer vaccine innovation
A research team in the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford has been awarded access to the UK’s most powerful AI supercomputing facilities to advance cancer vaccine research.
The project, A foundation model for cancer vaccine design, has been selected for an award by the UK Government’s prestigious AI Research Resource (AIRR) initiative, led by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The project will receive 10,000 GPU hours on the Dawn Supercomputer, currently the fastest artificial intelligence supercomputer in the UK.
Dr Lennard Lee, Associate Professor at the Centre for Immuno-Oncology and co-lead for the project, said: “We believe Oxford can lead a new era of discovery in cancer care – making treatments safer, more precise and more effective through use of cutting-edge technologies. Cancer vaccine design faces one of the greatest bottlenecks in development: access to high-performance compute infrastructure. With the UK’s fastest AI supercomputer now available to us, discoveries that once took years could now take just weeks.”
Mr Michael Bryan, a CRUK MB-PhD Fellow, said: “It’s a real privilege to be working at Oxford with the support of Cancer Research UK. Our team is developing our own specialised AI foundation models to accelerate the discovery of targets for life-saving cancer vaccine.”
The project will be delivered by the Nuffield Department of Medicine at the University of Oxford, one of the largest and most research-intensive medical science departments in the UK, with a track record that includes major contributions to pandemic vaccine development.
It will leverage publicly available tumour datasets to make discoveries across multiple cancer subtypes and contribute to the Oxford Neoantigen Atlas – an open-access platform supporting cancer vaccine research across the UK.
This work forms part of a broader national effort to accelerate the UK’s scientific capabilities, transformed by access to AI supercomputing power, to usher in a new era of immunology and vaccine discovery.
The AIRR programme, led by DSIT and UKRI, is investing over £1 billion to scale national compute capacity by 20-fold by 2030 – enabling bold, data-driven research across public and private sectors. This award aligns Oxford’s scientists with the government’s ambition to make Britain a global leader in AI, science, and healthcare innovation.