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Juan Carlos López
Senior WriterAn engineer by training. A science and tech journalist by passion, vocation, and conviction. I've been writing professionally for over two decades, and I suspect I still have a long way to go. At Xataka, I write about many topics, but I mainly enjoy covering nuclear fusion, quantum physics, quantum computers, microprocessors, and TVs.
Alba Mora
WriterAn established tech journalist, I entered the world of consumer tech by chance in 2018. In my writing and translating career, I've also covered a diverse range of topics, including entertainment, travel, science, and the economy.
AI applications extend far beyond the capabilities of models such as ChatGPT, DeepSeek, and DALL-E. These services are already integrated into many people’s daily lives, but AI is significantly advancing in other fields. These include the design of new materials, drug development, and medical diagnostics.
Damo Academy is the research arm of the Chinese giant Alibaba. Notably, it recently developed an AI tool that can detect pancreatic cancer at an early stage, even in asymptomatic patients. This cancer type has one of the worst prognoses, and the statistics are alarming. Pancreatic cancer is the seventh leading cause of cancer-related deaths worldwide, despite being the 12th most common cancer. Unfortunately, survival rates after diagnosis don’t exceed 10%.
The FDA Is Accelerating the Approval of Alibaba’s AI Cancer Detection Tool
Despite current tensions between the U.S. and China, both superpowers can set aside their differences when it comes to people’s health. One prime example of this is Damo Academy’s AI system. Alibaba’s research institute first revealed its tool to identify pancreatic cancer in a paper published in Nature Medicine in November 2023.
Some treatments have taken between 10 and 12 years to gain approval from the relevant health agencies.
The approval process for treatments is typically lengthy. Health agencies like the Food and Drug Administration often take between 10 and 12 years to give final approval. However, Alibaba’s AI tool is expected to be approved for patient use in a much shorter timeframe.
According to the South China Morning Post, the FDA has initiated an expedited review and approval process for Damo Panda, Alibaba’s AI model. This deep learning model has been trained using abdominal non-contrast CT scans from 3,208 pancreatic cancer patients. Preliminary tests indicate that it’s 34.1% more sensitive than radiologists in detecting this disease.
Alibaba has already used Damo Panda to screen 40,000 individuals at a hospital in Ningbo in Eastern China. The AI tool has successfully identified six cases of early-stage pancreatic cancer, two of which were missed by radiologists during routine examinations.
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