Giving Compass' Take:

• The convergence of technological expertise that is happening in Seattle is spurring innovation in many fields, including medical technology. 

• How can other areas create a similar effect? What problems are caused by the concentration of tech in small areas? 

• The news isn't all good. Find out how technology can be used to increase inequality. 

Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are now giants in cloud computing, a technology that allows their customers to store and analyze vast amounts of data without having to buy the computer hardware to handle it. The Seattle area is also home to scores of smaller biotechnology and computer technology companies who are finding common ground in the cloud.

Medical research — cancer research in particular — is increasingly driven by data. A treasure-trove of such data is being unearthed at the Hutch and elsewhere as an array of new laboratory technologies are probing the genetic roots of diseases and of the immune system.

The two companies are collaborating to apply Microsoft’s artificial intelligence technologies in its cloud-computing product, Azure, to help Adaptive develop a kind of digitized map of the human immune system.

Using DNA sequencing, Adaptive scientists are matching “receptor” molecules, found on the surfaces of disease-fighting blood components such as T cells, with “antigens,” which are bits of telltale proteins that show up on the surfaces of diseased cells. When a T-cell receptor connects to a matching antigen on a cancer cell, the T cell can wipe out the cancer cell.

Those fateful molecular matches are at the heart of a revolution in cancer involving immunotherapy, the harnessing of the human immune system to fight disease.

Read the full article on the life sciences boom in Seattle by Sabin Russell and Diane Mapes at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center