“Let’s make America the country that cures cancer once and for all” – IBM Watson Health and VA announce cooperation

Fri, 2016 / 10 / 21

In his just recently held The Union of the State-speech President Barack Obama announced that vice president Joe Biden will be installed as chairman for the newly initialized Cancer Moonshoot programme: a more than one billion USD government-funded research programme which is ambitiously aiming at the healing of any kind of cancer.

Up next was a promising statement by IBM Watson Health and the Veterans´s Administration of the US (VA). IBM and VA are planning a cooperation in the context of the programme for patients for individual cancer treatment benefiting over 10.000 American soldiers who suffer from cancer.

By means of technical resources provided by IBM Watson, VA is planning to analyze the genome of nearly 100 patients monthly in order to find adressable cancer mutations.According to vice president of IBM Watson Steve Harvey, the number of investigated persons is supposed to grow up to 800 cancer patients within the next 2 years.

Even though the most common source of cancer is a genetical mutation, a precise mutation-directed therapy is an enormous challenge due to the huge data volume, stated VA under secretary Dr. David Shulkin. In the future, patients should be selected by VA doctors for molecular genetic analysis and be screened by means of Watsons analysis skills aiming to find potentially carcinogenic mutations. But that´s not all: additionally, Watson is supposed to generate a listing based on its analysis results containing possible therapies and as well provide evidence grades and internal links to relevant ongoing studies. This on target-procedure could replace currently performed molecular tumor conferences and speed up the process of diagnosis and therapy.

The importance of research of cancer for veterans cannot be denied, because this group represents an over-average patient collective with 3,5% of all cancers in the US. This is the reason why VA invested more than 52 billion USD in more than 250 various research projects dealing with cancer and its prevention. But also for IBM this is a tremendous commitment regarding cancer research; hence the company announced already in April that it will be developing a virtual guidebook for cancer patients, working together with the American Cancer Society on the basis of Watson technology.

Futher information can be found on: http://www.fiercebiotech.com/medical-devices/va-to-use-ibm-s-watson-to-ramp-up-cancer-precision-medicine-capabilities