Greg Ledwon, a patient with acute myeloid leukemia says he is slaying cancer and is excited about the prospects of curing leukemia. He is a patient of Pamela Becker, a UW Medicine researcher and part of the core faculty with the Institute for Stem Cell and Regnerative Medicine. Becker is an author on a paper published recently in Nature Communications, which used artificial intelligence to find key genes to fight this disease. To do so, researchers needed to sort through the 17,000 genes present in each leukemia cell.

Su-In Lee, lead author and UW associate professor of computer science and engineering and genome sciences, and graduate student Safiye Celik created a machine-learning algorithm to identify a few dozen genes that might predict sensitivity or resistance to certain drug classes.