AI just made a $5000+ cancer test practically free every cancer biopsy produces a cheap tissue slide that shows the shape of your cells under a microscope. every patient already has one sitting in a lab somewhere (it costs $5-10) there's a much fancier version of that test, but it costs 500-1000x more (excluding many patients) it maps which immune cells are near your tumor and what they're actually doing. it takes specialized equipment most hospitals don't have and barely scales but it's the test oncologists need to figure out if immunotherapy will actually work for you. right now only 20-40% of patients respond, partly because doctors can't tell if your immune system is fighting the tumor or ignoring it microsoft, providence health, and the university of washington trained an AI to read the $5 slide and predict what the expensive test would show. they used 21 protein markers. trained it on 40 million cells and ran it on 14,000+ real cancer patients across 51 hospitals. the results: it found 1,200+ verified links between immune activity, mutations, and patient survival that were invisible at this scale before they validated it against a completely separate database of 10,200 patients. results matched almost perfectly ...