Ruth Porat, President and Chief Investment Officer of Alphabet and Google, addressed the American Society of Clinical Oncology's Annual Meeting in Chicago on June 4, 2025; outlining Google's AI research applications in cancer diagnosis, treatment, and care. Speaking as both a technology executive and two-time cancer survivor, Porat emphasised AI's potential as a "general purpose technology" with economists estimating a $20 trillion uplift to global GDP by 2030 if applied across industries.
Porat highlighted AlphaFold's breakthrough in protein folding, developed by Nobel Prize winners Demis Hassabis and John Jumper. "Until recently, mapping the structure of just a single protein used to take years of painstaking work — there are more than 200 million known proteins. At that pace, it would've taken humanity hundreds of thousands of years to map them all," she explained. "With AlphaFold, this was achieved in months, not years." The open-source database now serves more than 2.5 million scientists in over 190 countries.
Google's AI applications in cancer detection include deep learning models for identifying cancer cell clusters in lymph nodes on pathology slides, cutting pathologist review time in half while improving accuracy for small metastases detection. "The best results come when humans and AI work together; that outperforms both the pathologist who worked without AI and the algorithm that works without the pathologist," Porat noted.
Dr. Cliff Hudis, ASCO's CEO and Porat's former oncologist, characterised AI as "a critical part of democratising healthcare, so that everyone everywhere can have access to the best insights." Google's collaboration with ASCO on the new guidelines assistant provides clinicians with an AI-powered tool that "never tires, always learns and can sift through mountains of data in seconds," according to Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian.
Administrative burden reduction represents another key application area. Medical professionals lose substantial time to paperwork, with doctors spending one-third of their time on administrative tasks, and clinicians reporting 28 hours weekly lost to administration. AI tools demonstrate 30% improved efficiency for documenting patient explanations for doctors, and free up 40% of nurses' time for discharge reports.
Google has conducted over 700,000 diabetic retinopathy scans in Southeast Asia and India, targeting 6 million scans over the next decade for early intervention. Healthcare cybersecurity applications address record-high data breaches affecting over 80% of the U.S. population, with AI enabling early threat detection and infrastructure protection for targeted healthcare environments.
Google's comprehensive AI healthcare strategy positions the company across drug discovery, diagnostic assistance, administrative automation, and cybersecurity. The combination of breakthrough research like AlphaFold, with practical clinical applications demonstrates AI's transformative potential in healthcare delivery. Partnerships with medical organisations like ASCO establish Google as a trusted healthcare AI provider while the democratisation focus addresses global healthcare access challenges.