Google Deepmind's new Gemma model helped discover a new cancer treatment pathway.

Google Deepmind and Yale University have introduced a new AI model called C2S-Scale 27B, built on the open Gemma model family. The system analyzes single cells and, according to Google Deepmind, uncovered a previously unknown therapeutic pathway for cancer. The model identified the drug silmitasertib (CX-4945) as a "conditional enhancer" - meaning it can make tumor cells more visible to the immune system under specific conditions. In the team's words:

"This result also provides a blueprint for a new kind of biological discovery. It demonstrates that by following the scaling laws and building larger models like C2S-Scale 27B, we can create predictive models of cellular behavior that are powerful enough to run high-throughput virtual screens, discover context-conditioned biology, and generate biologically-grounded hypotheses."

Google Deepmind

Lab experiments with human neuroendocrine cell models confirmed the prediction. Before that, C2S-Scale simulated over 4,000 drugs in two immune environments. The code is available on GitHub, and the model can be found on Hugging Face. More details are in the preprint on bioRxiv.