IBM Watson Health and Illumina have officially joined forces, announcing a new partnership on Monday as the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference kicks off.
Watson Health is a serial collaborator, but it chose a pivotal agreement to spotlight at JPM. By integrating with Illumina’s platform, the two companies can create an end-to-end tumor sequencing workflow that could increase accessibility and scalability in the field. It could also address a major problem, said Watson Health Vice President Steve Harvey; a lack of standardization.
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“It’s a really nice, almost hand-in-glove fit,” Harvey said in a phone interview.
Founded in 1998, Illumina has dominated the sequencing field for many years. It now wants to transition into a broader genetic healthcare company. In November, it began offering a cancer diagnostics panel, the TruSight Tumor 170, which furthers that effort.
The Trusight panel looks at 170 of the most relevant oncology genes. Once sequenced, scientists can use Illumina’s BaseSpace software to turn the generated data into what are known as genetic alteration files.
“Where their technology ends, which is at the output of genetic alteration files, that’s really where the Watson technology begins,” Harvey said.
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Watson Genomics is a common cloud-based platform that, according to Harvey, can analyze genetic alteration files in a matter of minutes. All the researcher needs to do is input the files and then “ask” Watson to identify the mutations most likely to be cancer-causing. As part of the report, the supercomputer will also pinpoint therapies that directly target those mutations.
The three-step workflow could eventually be applied to many different disease fields. According to Harvey, the companies chose to start with cancer because it is closely tied to genetics and the scientific processes are highly variable.
“One of the big goals around this is just to try to help standardize and simplify the overall genomic data interpretation in the cancer space,” Harvey said.
It’s a well-recognized problem in cancer genomics. In January, the Association for Molecular Pathology, American Society of Clinical Oncology, and College of American Pathologists issued a series of recommendations that would allow scientists to build off each other’s work more effectively.
Exactly what protocol will emerge as the ‘right’ way of sequencing, annotating and interpreting tumors remains to be seen. But Illumina certainly has a formidable consumer base and the two technologies create one united, systematic workflow.
Until now, for example, there has been little consensus about what genes are important to analyze.
“They’ve worked with a lot outside institutes to really define, ‘these are the 170 genes that are probably most relevant if you’re going to go sequence a cancer cell,'” Harvey stated of Illumina’s TruSight panel.
Illumina’s BaseSpace software platform then standardizes the conversion of raw sequencing data into the genetic alteration files — another step that was widely variable. Watson is the final piece.
“Illumina can sell access to Watson Genomic reports now as part of the reagents kits that they’re selling,” Harvey said. “It makes it much easier for a diagnostics lab, or a cancer institute, to get up and running.”
It is, after all, a research-use-only platform. By streamlining the process, the companies hope to remove barriers to entry for researchers in the field. It is those researchers that will generate and validate novel findings and diagnostics and ultimately advance the field.
Photo: pagadesign, Getty Images
