NEW YORK, Aug. 28, 2014
/PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced
significant advances in Watson's cognitive computing capabilities
that are enabling researchers to accelerate the pace of scientific
breakthroughs by discovering previously unknown connections in Big
Data.
Available now as a cloud service, IBM's Watson Discovery Advisor
is designed to scale and accelerate discoveries by research teams.
It reduces the time needed to test hypotheses and formulate
conclusions that can advance their work -- from months to days and
days to just hours -- bringing new levels of speed and precision to
research and development.
Building on Watson's ability to
understand nuances in natural language, Watson Discovery Advisor
can understand the language of science, such as how chemical
compounds interact, making it a uniquely powerful tool for
researchers in life sciences and other industries.
Researchers and scientists from leading academic, pharmaceutical
and other commercial research centers have begun deploying IBM's
new Watson Discovery Advisor to rapidly analyze and test hypotheses
using data in millions of scientific papers available in public
databases. A new scientific research paper is published nearly
every 30 seconds, which equals more than a million annually
(Source: CiteSeerx). According to the National
Institutes of Health, a typical researcher reads about 23
scientific papers per month, which translates to nearly 300 per
year, making it humanly impossible to keep up with the ever-growing
body of scientific material available.
In 2013, the top 1,000 research and development companies spent
more than $600 billion annually on
research alone (Source: Strategy&). Progress can be slow,
taking an average of 10 to 15 years for a promising pharmaceutical
treatment to progress from the initial research stage into practice
(Source: Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America).
Using Watson Discovery Advisor, researchers can uncover new
relationships and recognize unexpected patterns among data that
have the potential to significantly improve and accelerate the
discovery process in research and science.
"We're entering an extraordinary age of data-driven discovery,"
said Mike Rhodin, senior vice
president, IBM Watson Group. "Today's announcement is a natural
extension of Watson's cognitive
computing capability. We're empowering researchers with a powerful
tool which will help increase the impact of investments
organizations make in R&D, leading to significant
breakthroughs."
Leading life sciences organizations are deploying Watson
Discovery Advisor to advance discoveries in ongoing research
projects, including Baylor College of
Medicine, Johnson & Johnson and The New York Genome
Center.
- In a retrospective, peer reviewed study released this week by
Baylor College of Medicine and
IBM, scientists demonstrated a possible new path for generating
scientific questions that may be helpful in the long term
development of new, effective treatments for disease. In a matter
of weeks, biologists and data scientists using the Baylor Knowledge
Integration Toolkit (KnIT), based on Watson technology, accurately identified
proteins that modify p53, an important protein related to many
cancers, which can eventually lead to better efficacy of drugs and
other treatments. A feat that would have taken researchers years to
accomplish without Watson's
cognitive capabilities, Watson
analyzed 70,000 scientific articles on p53 to predict proteins that
turn on or off p53's activity. This automated analysis led the
Baylor cancer researchers to identify six potential proteins to
target for new research. These results are notable, considering
that over the last 30 years, scientists averaged one similar target
protein discovery per year.
"On average, a scientist might read between one and five
research papers on a good day," said Dr. Olivier Lichtarge, the principal investigator
and professor of molecular and human genetics, biochemistry and
molecular biology at Baylor College of
Medicine. "To put this in perspective with p53, there are
over 70,000 papers published on this protein. Even if I'm reading
five papers a day, it could take me nearly 38 years to completely
understand all of the research already available today on this
protein. Watson has demonstrated
the potential to accelerate the rate and the quality of
breakthrough discoveries."
- Johnson & Johnson is collaborating with the IBM
Watson Discovery Advisor team to teach Watson to read and understand scientific
papers that detail clinical trial outcomes used to develop and
evaluate medications and other treatments. This collaboration hopes
to accelerate comparative effectiveness studies of drugs, which
help doctors match a drug with the right set of patients to
maximize effectiveness and minimize side effects. Typically,
comparative effectiveness studies are done manually, requiring
three people to spend an average of 10 months (2.5 man-years) just
to collect the data and prepare them for use before they are able
to start analyzing, generating and validating a hypothesis. In this
research study, the team hopes to teach Watson to quickly synthesize the information
directly from the medical literature, allowing researchers to start
asking questions about the data immediately to determine the
effectiveness of a treatment compared to other medications, as well
as its side effects.
- IBM Watson will be supporting the analysis in New York Genome Center's
clinical study to advance genomic medicine. The clinical study will
initially focus on clinical application of genomics to help
oncologists deliver DNA-based treatment for glioblastoma, an
aggressive form of brain cancer that kills more than 13,000
Americans each year. Despite tremendous discoveries into the
genetic drivers of diseases like cancer over the past decade, big
data makes it difficult to translate DNA data into life-saving
treatments. Based on results from the clinical study, IBM Watson
could soon help scale up the availability of personalized treatment
options.
Industry Implications
Discovering something new is applicable to many domains such as
medicine, law, finance, etc., that all require deep insight into a
large body of information and protocols. Cognitive computing will
allow human experts to interact with large bodies of data and
research and the knowledge and insight of many other experts in
their field. For example, Watson
could be used to:
- Accelerate a medical researcher's ability to develop
life-saving treatments for diseases by synthesizing evidence and
removing reliance on serendipity
- Enhance a financial analyst's ability to provide proactive
advice to clients
- Improve a lawyer's merger and acquisition strategy with faster,
more comprehensive due diligence and document analysis
- Accelerate a government analyst's insight into security,
intelligence, border protection and law enforcement and guidance,
etc.
- Create new food recipes. Chefs can use Watson to augment their creativity and
expertise and help them discover recipes, learning about the
language of cooking and food by reading recipes, statistical,
molecular and food pairing theories, hedonic chemistry, as well as
regional and cultural knowledge
IBM Watson Discovery Advisor has the potential to transform
industries and professions that rely heavily on data, including
law, pharmaceuticals, biotech, education, chemicals, metals,
scientific research, engineering, and criminal investigations. For
more information, visit
https://ibm.biz/watsondiscoveryadvisor.
IBM Power Systems serves as the infrastructure base of
Watson, supporting the high volume
of data needed to drive cognitive insights.
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IBM Watson: Pioneering a New Era of Computing
Three
years after its victory on the TV quiz show Jeopardy!, IBM Watson
has evolved to represent a new era of computing, earning
recognition from Frost & Sullivan, which presented IBM Watson
with the 2013 North America Award for New Product Innovation, and
Gartner Inc., which cites IBM Watson in its Top 10 Strategic
Technology Trends for 2014 and predicts that by 2017, 10 percent of
computers will be able to learn as Watson does.
Today, Watson is no longer just
the world's most famous game-playing computer. IBM has put
Watson to work in various
industries. In healthcare, IBM is co-developing an application with
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and partnering with
WellPoint, the University of Texas MD
Anderson Cancer Center, and the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of
Medicine. Additionally, IBM has partnered with numerous
colleges and universities across the country to teach Watson capabilities and cognitive computing
technology to the next generation workforce.
For more information on IBM Watson, please visit:
www.ibmwatson.com
To join the social discussion about Watson, include the hashtag #ibmwatson. Follow
Watson on Facebook and see
Watson on YouTube and Flickr.
Journalists and bloggers can download a video and images about
IBM Watson Discovery by clicking here.
For more insights on this story please read these posts on IBM's
A Smarter Planet blog: ibm.co/1tFVdly, ibm.co/XPzxIY,
ibm.co/1vj8dQZ
Media Contacts
Tod Freeman
IBM Media
Relations
(415) 320-5893
tefreema@us.ibm.com
John Connolly
IBM Media Relations
(781) 636-8512
jconnol@us.ibm.com
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SOURCE IBM