The Cleveland Clinic has teamed up with IBM’s cognitive computing system, Watson, to help oncologists sift through the massive amounts of patient genetic data and identify targets for treatment.
The collaboration will help “accelerate the race to personalized medicine and cut through the Big Data challenge of genomics so patients can be treated based on their specific DNA mutation,” an IBM spokesman said.
Scientists at Cleveland Clinic’s Lerner Research Institute will use IBM’s Watson Genomics Analytics platform to not only burrow through the vast annals of academic papers that are out there – clinicians just don’t have the bandwidth to do it individually – and compare it to an individual’s DNA.
“My laboratory already has beta sets of whole genome and exome sequencing of patients with various diseases,” Dr. Charis Eng told the Cleveland Plain-Dealer. The amount of data for each patient “is like being handed 35,000 encyclopedias.”
