Dark sedan, bodyguards, stolen entrance, millimeter organization. This Tuesday, February 11, it is not a head of state that is about to discover The Curie Institutebut it’s just like. Passing through Paris for the summit on artificial intelligence, Sundar Pichai, the big boss of Google, one of the masters of the tech world, makes a detour by the Sainte-Geneviève mountain, at the very place where Marie Curie Créa His institute to apply the results of his scientific research to the treatment of cancer patients. It is expected on the third floor of the hospital, where all the biopsies and tumors extracted from the patients arrive to be analyzed. With this visit, which L’Express was able to follow exclusively, it is a question of making a partnership, unprecedented in France, concretize, between the digital giant and the cancer control center. Ambition: to accelerate research against certain tumors that are difficult to treat, to save patients today often condemned.
The stakes are high for the French as well as for the Americans-and explains the arrival of Sundar Pichai himself, for the second time in a few months, despite a timetable overloaded by the news of the summit. “Here we have incredible amounts of data, from the analysis of fabrics, imaging, nuclear medicine, genomic analysis and other technologies. Artificial intelligence will help us combine them, In order to better understand tumors, “hopes Anne Vincent-Salomon, head of the” Anapath “service (anatomopathology, who studies the biological samples taken from the sick) of Curia and director of the Institute of Women’s Cancers. For the google leader, beyond the scientific challenge, it is above all a question of illustrating the benefits of his technologies: “See these concrete AI applications, all the potential it can bring, gives a lot of Meaning to everything we do, “says Sundar Pichai.
Decipher the heterogeneity of tumors
The visit starts in the macroscopy room. Here come the samples of biopsies or operating parts which will be frozen and then fixed in the formalus before being cut into increasingly fine slices, to the micron. Posed on glass blades, colored, they will then be scanned and digitalized. In this advanced service, computers have long replaced microscopes, but the idea remains the same: identifying the anomalies which sign the presence of a malignant lesion. A delicate and hyperspecalized task, unknown but essential cog in the care path of patients. Anne Vincent-Salomon shows the leader of Google a bottle: a biopsy of a size extracted from the uterus of a patient. Maybe a benign fibroma. Or a formidable sarcoma. “There are gray areas, this can be difficult to determine. We want to develop tools to facilitate the identification of these rare cancers,” she explains.
Far from being homogeneous masses, tumors are made up of a multitude of very varied cells. This heterogeneity, sometimes difficult to grasp for doctors, can complicate the diagnosis. It is also also at the origin of relapses, because some of these cells can be resistant to treatments. Little by little, surreptitiously, they are the ones who will relaunch the disease. To better understand what is played out in these piles of flesh, a new technology is booming in the world of oncology: “single cell” analysis. For a given lesion, specialists isolate 20,000 to 30,000 cells. They sequence the genome of each of them, to identify their specificities. “It generates gigantic information masses. This is where we need you,” says Anne Vincent-Salomon to Sundar Pichai.
Understanding the interactions between cells
If the CEO of Google and Alphabet readily admits to its hosts that its expertise lies more in IT than in biology, it nevertheless requires seeing the latest advanced technique deployed in Curie: Spatial transcriptomics. A name as complicated as technology is complex, since it is a question of combining information from the analysis in single cell with the location of each of these cells in the tumor. “It is an incredible tool, which makes it possible to understand how the different families of cells interact with each other,” sums up Anne Vincent-Salomon. The analysis can even be done over time, to follow the reactions of all this microcosm to treatments.
“This technique will be applied to our other major project: the study of 30 % of cancers in the so -called triple negative breasts, which resist all the available treatments,” continues the researcher. About 3,000 women are affected each year in France. Anne Vincent-Salomon is moved, anxious to share the feeling of emergency that inhabits him: “These patients, often young, do not have time to wait, they need that we are progressing quickly, because they are They cannot be saved. ” To understand the origin of these resistances, the professor relies on artificial intelligence. “It is a question of integrating these data with those from imaging, medical records and all scientific knowledge already acquired in the field. Large models of language can digest all this information of a very different nature”, details Joëlle Barral, the French scientist who directs the search for Google Deepmind, the Google laboratory dedicated to AI. His long -term goal? Lead to a joint publication, like other work already carried out by its teams with American or British hospitals. “This will show that science has advanced,” she said.
Develop a common language
For the moment, the alliance between Curie and Google will first materialize by the recruitment of four young postdoctoralants, thanks to a donation of 2.2 million euros in Google.orgGoogle’s philanthropic branch. The rest of the partnership is the subject of an agreement in principle, and the discussions continue to finalize it. “We sign more than a hundred collaboration contracts per year with companies, excluding clinical trials, decrypt Amaury Martin, deputy director responsible for innovation at the Curie Institute. Experience, it takes time: it is necessary That researchers, on each side, get to know each other, develop a common language, understand the whole point of collaboration. “
Here is also the ultrasensible question of data security and confidentiality. The Curie Institute launched very early, in the year 2000, in the digitalization of its medical records. Its health data warehouse contains 360,000 files, 16 million medical reports, 2.1 million medical imaging, 25,000 genetic examinations and 25,000 blades from Anapath. A rare wealth that there is of course no question of transferring to the American company. Curie and Google also appear very anxious to lend the side to any criticism. “Patients give their consent for the use of their personal information for research purposes. The Curie Institute keeps property and control. The data will be encrypted and analyzed in the secure cloud of Thalès, using Google technologies , and analysis and calculation tools will be made available to researchers, “summarizes a spokesperson for the American group. Sundar Pichai is already moving away, to find his sedan, and disappear in Paris. Exactly twenty minutes have passed since his arrival.
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