November 2025
The Cancer AI Alliance (CAIA) is a multi-site research collaboration of top cancer centers, including The Sidney Kimmel Comprehensive Cancer Center and Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins. CAIA recently announced the first scalable platform using federated learning for cancer research.
Federated learning is an AI training approach that brings the AI model to the data instead of requiring participating cancer centers to share their data to a central location.This approach allows the AI model to train on a large amount of data while keeping it secure at each site.
The platform enables researchers and clinicians to collaborate in training AI models that learn from the participating cancer centers’ clinical data points, while maintaining data security and privacy, and adhering to regulatory and ethical standards.
This platform was launched within a short timeline involving multiple IT@JH teams working with Drs. Alexis Battle, Vasan Yegnasubramanian, and several external consultants to harmonize the data, set up the required IT infrastructure, and connect to the federated network of sites. The platform has the potential to scale up with additional research models and more participants within CAIA.
Learn more about this exciting development on CAIA’s website.
