How personalized healthcare is revolutionizing how we fight cancer

IBM

As doctors know, every patient is unique. Each person's DNA makes some medicines more effective than others. Making it even more complicated for medical professionals, new drug therapies and medical studies come out nearly every day.

To keep up with the differences in our bodies and the wealth of information out there, doctors are increasingly getting assistance — particularly in treating cancer — from a sophisticated technological source: IBM Watson Health.

In creating cognitive healthcare solutions, IBM teamed up with oncologists to sift through available data from around the world, gaining comprehensive and up-to-date insights on cancer-causing mutations. 

Lightning-fast medical insights 

One of the most difficult and complex diseases to treat is cancer. Most of the 1.6 million Americans who are diagnosed with cancer each year receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment. Yet when standard treatments fail and as genetic sequencing becomes increasingly accessible and affordable, some patients are beginning to benefit from treatments that target their specific cancer-causing genetic mutations.

Watson for Genomics helps clinicians to analyze each mutation, then identify tailored treatment options for patients. Without Watson, this kind of personalized treatment can take weeks. 

"When you are dealing with cancer, it always a race,” Lukas Wartman, MD, assistant director of cancer genomics at The McDonnell Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis, told IBM. “As a cancer patient myself, I know how important genomic information can be. Unfortunately, translating cancer-sequencing results into potential treatment options often takes weeks with a team of experts to study just one patient’s tumor and provide results to guide treatment decisions. Watson appears to help dramatically reduce that timeline."

With Watson, oncologists can produce a report and data visualization of the patient’s case, along with evidence-based insights on relevant potential drugs that are recommended for an individual patient’s DNA profile. Watson Health provides this in minutes.

Oncologist Norman Sharpless, Director, UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center told IBM that what first impressed him about Watson was that it could "read and ingest disparate sources of data on a single patient." In a demo from MD Anderson Cancer Center, he watched as Watson read the chest X-ray, the electrocardiogram, and the physician notes. It looked at the pathology results and incorporated all of the data. 

Sharpless says some of the data were "images, a PDF, and some of it was spoken word." Watson easily made sense of it all and tied it together into something an oncologist could review quickly. 

Partnering with Watson Health

To develop Watson for Genomics, IBM Watson Health collaborates with more than a dozen leading cancer institutes, including the New York Genome Center, Columbia University Medical Center, University of North Carolina, Washington University, and more. 

Partners use Watson to look for variations in the patient's genome. Then it examines data sources such as treatment guidelines, research, clinical studies, journal articles, and patient information, and provides a list of medical literature that's relevant to the case, along with drugs that have been identified in the literature.

The patient's doctor reviews this information alongside underlying evidence to make more informed treatment decisions. Watson for Genomics constantly gets smarter as the system learns from patient data.

IBM Watson Health is bringing the promise of personalized healthcare closer to reality for everyone. And that's a huge step forward. Or as Norman Sharpless told IBM, "It used to be that cancer was so mysterious that it was hard to figure out how we were going to beat it, but I think now most oncologists feel we have a path to victory."

Find out more about IBM Watson Health. 

This post is sponsored by IBM.

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