Several cancer centers in the United States and Canada have expressed interest in using International Business Machines Corp's (IBM) Watson analytic system to speed up the process of finding the genetic fingerprints of tumors and choose the best therapy available.
While DNA sequencing and analysis is recognized as the best way to identify cancer-causing mutations, the process could take hours, days, or weeks and involves several brain power to analyze a sample.
But with Watson, the process could only take minutes.
The collaborating centers are Ann & Robert H Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago; BC Cancer Agency; City of Hope; Cleveland Clinic; Duke Cancer Institute; Fred & Pamela Buffett Cancer Center in Omaha, Nebraska; McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis; New York Genome Center; Sanford Health; University of Kansas Cancer Center; University of North Carolina Lineberger Cancer Center; University of Southern CaliforniaCenter for Applied Molecular Medicine ; University of Washington Medical Center; and Yale Cancer Center.
These cancer centers, according to Reuters, will be using Watson's cloud-base service. The process starts with oncologists extracting the DNA fingerprint of a patient's tumor. It indicates the mutated genes which may have caused the malignancy of cells.
Then, a sample of the DNA fingerprint is uploaded and will be analyzed by Watson by looking at its database. Once it identifies the cause of the tumor, it will recommend the right drugs - experimental cancer drug and even non-cancer drug - to oncologists.
A pool of specialist will then come up with the decision based on the findings of Watson.
However, Watson may still have a problem in providing the right drugs or therapy to act on cancers with several mutations and may still recommend radiation and chemotherapy as the standard of care for many common cancers it may analyzed
Still, some doctors see the speed in which the analytic platform can provide the possible drug for the malignancy is still valuable.
BM Watson Health vice president Steve Harvey said a subscription fee , which he did not disclose the exact amount, will be paid by the centers for the Watson Health's cloud-based service.
IBM's Watson has the reputation as the system that competed and won in the game Jeopardy in 2011, beating Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. It has database of 200 million structured and unstructured content, including the full text of Wikipedia, contained in four terabytes of disk space.
It was recalled that in February 2013, IBM partnered with WellPoint and offered Watson's service to the Memorial Sloan-Keating Cancer Center.
