Artificial intelligence-generated synthetic data for cancer research and clinical trials

<p>Nature Reviews Cancer, Published online: 20 February 2026; <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41568-026-00912-4">doi:10.1038/s41568-026-00912-4</a></p>Synthetic data generated by generative artificial intelligence models can serve as a substitute for real patient data. In this Review, Eckardt et al. discuss how synthetic data sets can overcome barriers to data access and sharing, democratize scientific discovery in cancer research, and reduce the costs and failure rates of cancer…