Another announcement is made at the White House Precision Medicine Summit: A collaboration between IBM and the New York Genome Center. They plan to create a comprehensive, open cancer data repository.
IBM Watson is hoping to accelerate cancer research, and with this new HIPAA compliant repository, it will include the entire genome, exome and phenotypic data, which sets it apart from what currently exists in data collection of this kind.
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The goal with this collaboration and data collection is to provide doctors with even more information in order to further personalize care and take better advantage of gene sequencing.
According to a release, IBM will be building the technology that will contain the data and allow Watson to provide cognitive computing capabilities and genomic analysis. The New York Genome Center will be working directly with institutions and physicians to sequence DNA and RNA in patients to actually add data to the repository.
The new project will start with a pilot that will be sequencing tumors from 200 cancer patients to compare how different types of sequencing might impact potential treatment options.
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