IBM Watson Health and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard will collaborate to research the underlying causes of cancer drug resistance.
The five-year collaboration includes $50 million to generate data from 10,000 patient samples and lab studies. The Broad Institute will then research the tumor genome sequence data. It will also conduct additional lab studies to pinpoint tumors' vulnerabilities. Researchers from IBM will analyze the data and categorize genomic patterns that could forecast patients' drug resistance.
"Knowing how cancers can become resistant will ultimately require learning from hundreds of thousands of patients' experiences," said Eric Lander, PhD, president and founding director of the Broad Institute. "We're proud to work with IBM to make an important start toward this goal, and to make the information broadly available to the scientific community."