IBM and the New York Genome Center, a consortium of medical research institutions in New York City, are partnering to bring personalized medicine to cancer patients.
Through the partnership, IBM is harnessing supercomputer IBM Watson's technology to help providers combine and analyze genomic sequencing data with medical literature and pharmaceutical information to find the best treatment paths for individual cancer patients, according to an NPR report. Watson's core capability, which helped it win on Jeopardy!, is the ability to quickly process massive amounts of information and come to a conclusion.
With the help of Watson, Robert Darnell, MD, PhD, founding director of the New York Genome Center and a neuro-oncologist at Rockefeller University, and his group studied 30 patients with glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, and developed personalized treatment options for each patient "based on genetic mutations present in the tumor," Dr. Darnell said, according to NPR. Dr. Darnell did not disclose specifics of the findings, as they have not yet been published. But, he told NPR, "there are patients who will benefit" from this study.
Now IBM and the New York Genome Center are looking to find out whether Watson can apply what he learned from Dr. Darnell's research to a larger group of glioblastoma patients, according to NPR.
Dr. Darnell told NPR he wants to ultimately execute a large-scale clinical trial, recruiting "any cancer patient who is sick, not necessarily from glioblastoma."