Early trial data shows a drug developed using artifical intelligence can slow the growth of cancer in clinical trials. The data, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting in Chicago recently, showed some tumours shrank by around a quarter. The compound will now be taken into more advanced trials. Scientists said we were now in an explosive stage of merging advances in computing with medicine.

Spotting every difference between a cancerous and a healthy cell is beyond even the birhgtest human minds. So the US biotechnology company Berg has been feeding as much data as its scientists could measure on the biochemistry of cells into a super computer. The aim was to let an artificial intelligence suggest a way of switching a cancerous cell back to a healthy one. It led to their first drug, named BPM31510, which tries to reverse the Warburg effect - the phenomenon in which cancerous cells change their energy supply. Data from 85 patients showed signs the approach could kill tumours. The trial was designed to test only for toxicity, but in one patient the tumour shrank by 25%. Dr Niven Narain, one of the founders of Berg, told the BBC that it was still early days for the drug, but claimed supercomputing was the future of cancer.