Assignment: Pfizer to use IBM Watson supercomputing to find new drugs

IBM Watson Health is partnering with Pfizer to use supercomputing to find new potential drugs.

The agreement is one the several IBM Watson Health is signing with clinical groups in the realm of drug discovery, and uses Watson Health's new product - IBM Watson for Drug Discovery - to read through reams of data, literature, genetic information and public studies to point out new potential drug compounds for a variety of diseases.

Pfizer will use a customized version of Watson for Drug Discovery that focuses on immunetheraphy, which modifies a patient's immune system to recognize and target cancer cells and is considered by many in the biotech field as the future of cancer treatments.

"At the end of the day it will reduce the time of the drug discovery process potentially reduce the cost, but most importantly is bringing drugs faster, especially in the area of oncology and immunoncology to the market and into the hands of patients," said ShahramEbadollahi, vice president of innovations & chief science officer for IBM Watson Health, in an interview.

Looking for new drugs is a lengthy and costly proposition. Most estimates conclude it takes $2.6 billion to develop a single drug, a portion of which is dedicated to teams of scientists pouring through scientific literature to find Watson, best known for defeating Ken Jennings in Jeopardy, can streamline much of that, incorporating technology analysis, language processing, and similarity analysis to both structured and unstructured data to develop hypothesis and interact with users.

Already Watson has ingested 25 million Medline abstracts, more than 1 million full-text medical journal articles, 4 million patents and is regularly updated with more.

Though Pfizer is the first major user, and first to customize it for oncology, some other groups have started using Watson for Drug Discovery in recent months. Others are already making strides in finding new drug targets, and are set to announce them in the coming weeks, a spokeswoman said.

"(The partnership) is aligned with everything else we've been doing since inception of Watson in 2014", Ebadollahi said. "At the end of the day, what motivates us is having an impact on people's lives. In this scenario, can we help bring drugs faster in this area to the market and in the hands of patients who need it at a much more efficient rate. It's transformational.

A spokeswoman declined to specify how much clients pay for the product or what kind of impact the launch of the product might have on IBM Watson Health's financials.

"At Pfizer, we are entering a new frontier in data innovation in which we are investing in a range of new technologies and digital solutions to help us dynamically mine both internal and external data sources to find new connections in science, as well as help us better understand how diseases progress and how they could potentially be treated," said Laurie Olson, executive vice president of strategy, portfolio and commercial operations for Pfizer, in a release. "Applying the power of cognitive computing to an area that is a core part of our DNA - discovering new medicines - is helping Pfizer to learn how we can most efficiently discover those immune-oncology therapies that have the best chance of successful outcomes for patients.

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