In the UK, someone is diagnosed with cancer every two minutes, and across the world almost 10 million people die from cancer every year. Novel, targeted, less toxic treatments, biomarkers for early detection, diagnostics, and clinical applications are urgently needed.

Cancer AI Foundation Models, that have the capability to process multiple modalities of health data, including pathology, multi-omics, radiology images, and clinical text, are demonstrating exceptional performance in drug discovery and clinical tasks. Yet their development is hindered by data access, fragmentation, harmonisation, and governance issues. PharosAI aims to solve this complex challenge, democratising cancer AI and accelerating the pathway to AI-powered cancer care.

PharosAI is a contractual joint venture between two leading research-intensive universities, King's College London and Queen Mary University of London and two innovative NHS Trusts, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust and Barts Health Trust. PharosAI aims to accelerate AI-powered cancer care, driving breakthrough therapies, clinical applications, addressing cancer's social determinants, lowering barriers to UK SMEs, catalysing innovation, and positioning the UK as a global leader in this dynamic ecosystem.

PharosAI has been awarded £18.9M in Research Venture Catalyst funding from the Department for Science, Innovation, and Technology; and cash and in-kind contributions from partners across pharma, biotech, AI, and charities, bringing the total investment to £44M. PharosAI has exceptional stakeholder support from industry, policy-makers, and patients (PIVOT). PharosAI is led by an exceptional leadership team with expertise across the cancer R&D and commercialisation pathway. We intend to spin out PharosAI as an independent growth company within our three-year business plan.

We have designed PharosAI to harness the enormous potential of research-active biobank data. PharosAI will create and curate unite unique, large-scale multimodal cancer datasets and combine them with AI models through a highly secure, trusted, federated platform. Through these capabilities, PharosAI will offer an end-to-end cancer AI innovation and product development ecosystem for drug discovery and clinical applications as a service to researchers and developers in commercial and non-commercial research settings.

PharosAI will accelerate cancer research, development, and innovation through AI, a market worth >$300bn globally. It will advance cancer discoveries, nurture high-growth companies, and stimulate economic growth. By fostering the next generation of innovators, researchers and clinicians, PharosAI will position the UK as a global cancer AI leader, ultimately benefitting patients worldwide.