Sovereign AI Accelerator
The Cancer Immunity Supercomputing AI Accelerator is the world’s first research platform dedicated to decoding and modelling cancer immunity using advanced artificial intelligence and sovereign supercomputing.
OUR APPROACH
We have a dedicated research programme enabling AI-driven discovery in cancer immunology, vaccine development, and therapeutic innovation.
The Cancer Immunity Supercomputing AI Accelerator is a research initiative led by Oxford University. The programme provides access to sovereign AI supercomputing resources for research teams working at the intersection of cancer biology, immunology, and artificial intelligence.
The accelerator has been established to support the development and scaling of advanced AI models designed to improve the understanding of cancer immunity and enable new approaches to vaccine design and therapeutic discovery. Participating teams will work within a collaborative environment that integrates computational science, immunology, and translational research.
PART OF OUR SOVEREIGN AI FOR SCIENCE STRATEGY
The accelerator forms part of the UK Cancer Vaccine AI Scientist and Supercomputing Project, recognised within the United Kingdom’s Ten Year Plan for Cancer. The programme reflects a broader national strategy to strengthen sovereign AI capabilities, accelerate biomedical discovery, and expand the application of advanced computational methods in healthcare and life sciences research.
Selected teams can access to large-scale AI infrastructure alongside an interdisciplinary research network focused on high-impact scientific questions in cancer immunology.
EXCELLENCE IN SCOPE AND DELIVERY
The programme is designed to support research that advances the modelling, prediction, or mechanistic understanding of immune responses in cancer. This includes, but is not limited to, projects involving:
• Computational immunology and immune modelling
• Cancer vaccine design and antigen prediction
• AI methods applied to tumour–immune interactions
• Immune response prediction and simulation
• Discovery of novel immunologically relevant therapeutic targets
Projects are encouraged across different cancer subtypes. The accelerator encourages ambitious, methodologically rigorous research that can benefit from large-scale AI training, inference, or simulation workloads.
CREATING WORLD LEADING AI TEAMS
Ten leadership teams will progress and receive access to the United Kingdom’s sovereign AI supercomputing infrastructure, with compute allocations.
Compute resources are provided enabling researchers to develop, scale, and evaluate AI models that would otherwise exceed typical institutional capacity. The accelerator’s design prioritises scientifically meaningful workloads rather than exploratory or speculative compute use.
EOIs are invited from research groups based in the United Kingdom and international centres of excellence. The programme seeks to appoint eight UK-based leadership teams and two internationally based leadership teams.
Teams should demonstrate:
• Strong scientific or clinical grounding in relevant disciplines
• Clear justification for large-scale AI or computational workloads
• Methodological credibility and technical readiness
• Potential for high-impact contributions to cancer immunology or therapeutics
Interdisciplinary teams combining biological, clinical, and computational expertise are strongly encouraged.
The Cancer AI accelerator is supported through a partnership involving the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, UK Research and Innovation, Cancer Research UK, and Oxford University. The programme is designed to complement existing research funding mechanisms by providing infrastructure-focused support that enables computationally intensive discovery.
Research teams interested in participating in the Cancer Immunity Supercomputing AI Accelerator are invited to submit an expression of interest. Application guidance, eligibility criteria, evaluation principles, and compute allocation details are available through the Centre for Immuno-Oncology.