AbbVie and Cerebras Systems have reached a landmark in progressing AbbVie’s artificial intelligence (AI) work. The company has utilised Cerebras CS-2 from Cerebras sytems, which accelerates AI, while radically reducing power consumption.

In using a Cerebras CS-2 on biomedical natural language processing models, AbbVie achieved performance over 128 times that of a typical graphics processing unit (GPU), while using a third of the energy.

“A common challenge we experience with programming and training is providing sufficient GPU cluster resources for sufficient periods of time,” said Brian Martin, head of AI at AbbVie.

“The CS-2 system will provide wall-clock improvements that alleviate much of this challenge, while providing a simpler programming model that accelerates our delivery by enabling our teams to iterate more quickly and test more ideas,” he added.

AbbVie, a global biopharmaceutical company, has a focus on cutting-edge R&D across immunology, neuroscience, oncology and virology. In pursuing innovative treatments, AbbVie utilises large and sophisticated AI language models to build its translation service, Abbelfish.

The service accurately translates and makes vast libraries of biomedical literature searchable, across 180 languages using large, state-of-the-art transformer models.

PrecisionLife has announced a partnership with Sano Genetics – a genetic research platform enabling patients to participate in ethical research projects. It is hoped that the move will accelerate the understanding of long-term COVID-19 impacts.

The project will analyse Sano Genetics’ data from 3,000 UK adults suffering from long COVID symptoms, using PrecisionLife’s proprietary combinatorial analytics platform to identify risk-factors and potential drug targets.

It is estimated that 5-30% of COVID-19 patients will go on to have long-term complications and – with over 500 million people worldwide confirmed as having been infected – the need for better diagnostics and treatments is of utmost importance.

Under the terms of the collaboration, Sano Genetics will provide access to its long COVID patient population data set to PrecisionLife for analysis.

Dr Patrick Short, CEO and co-founder of Sano Genetics, said: “Learning to live with COVID-19 and manage its health consequences has long-term public health and economic implications. An estimated 1.7 million people in the UK have reported experiences of long COVID, with symptoms lasting longer than four weeks.”