A few weeks after announcing the creation of its business unit Watson Health to use its cognitive computing system in the medical field, IBM has announced new partnerships in this initiative. Fourteen cancer institutes will work together with IBM to achieve progress particularly in the field of genomics and offer their patients more personalized treatments.
Ann & Robert H Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, BC Cancer Agency, City of Hope, Cleveland Clinic, Duke Cancer Institute, Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center in Omaha, Nebraska, McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, New York Genome Center, Sanford Health, University of Kansas Cancer Center, University of North Carolina Lineberger Cancer Center, University of Southern California Center for Applied Molecular Medicine, University of Washington Medical Center, and Yale Cancer Center are the institutes that will participate in the Watson Health project.
The IBM Watson system will be used with a much wider group of patients by the end of 2015 to accelerate the ability to provide personalized therapies for cancer patients. This will be achieved by helping doctors to make the most of the latest research that also concern the field of oncology, starting with those in the field of genomics.
There are forms of cancer where genetic mutations have a key role. Standard treatments such as surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy may fail if those genetic factors are not considered. The analysis of mutations in patients are becoming increasingly popular allowing to personalize therapies but they take a long time because of the huge amount of data that gets created.
In the Watson Health project, the IBM cognitive computing system was trained to analyze huge amounts of medical data in a short time. In the case of cancer patients, Watson can quickly find relevant data in medical records, articles in the sector’s journals and clinical trials.
Giving the right mix of drugs in chemotherapy can make the difference between life and death for the patient but determining that mix is a complex job. Thanks to Watson, clinicians will be able to save precious time and find the relevant information to decide a personalized therapy in minutes instead of weeks. People have been talking about Watson for some years, now the practical results are beginning to arrive with consequences which may be really remarkable.
