Novo Nordisk, IBM Watson Health to Create "Virtual Doctor"
December 10 2015 - 8:50AM
Dow Jones News
Novo Nordisk A/S is teaming up with IBM Watson Health, a
division of International Business Machines Corp., to create a
"virtual doctor" for diabetes patients that could dispense
treatment advice such as insulin dosage.
The Danish diabetes specialist hopes to use IBM's supercomputer
platform, Watson, to analyze health data from diabetes patients to
help them manage their disease.
Jakob Riis, an executive vice president at Novo Nordisk, said
data from continuous blood-sugar monitors that upload readings to
the Internet could be analyzed and used to inform treatment
decisions.
He said that more data could potentially be incorporated into
such a tool, including food intake, exercise and accurate
information on the timings and dosage of insulin injections.
There are "a lot of routine issues around judgments of dosing
and the whole interplay between food intake, exercise and insulin
that could be better handled by AI [artificial intelligence] that
can draw on a much broader source of data," Mr. Riis said. "That is
what computers typically do well."
IBM's Watson platform, made famous when it beat two contestants
on the television game show "Jeopardy" in 2011, is a collection of
artificial-intelligence software that can process and analyze vast
amounts of information to spot patterns and answer questions. IBM
launched its Watson Health business earlier this year to focus on
applications in the sector.
Novo Nordisk isn't the first to apply the platform to health
care. One of the earlier adopters was New York's Memorial Sloan
Kettering Cancer Center, which in 2012 said it was working with IBM
Watson to develop a tool to help oncologists draw on huge amounts
of clinical data to diagnose and treat cancer. Other major
hospitals have followed suit in various disease areas, and
pharmaceutical companies have also gotten on board. Earlier this
year, Johnson & Johnson struck up a partnership with IBM Watson
Health to develop a "virtual coach" for people who had undergone
knee-replacement surgery.
The Novo Nordisk collaboration will also span other projects.
Mr. Riis said it would also involve analyzing the 50 million
anonymized U.S. medical records held by IBM Watson Health. Those
records span a cross-section of Americans, not just diabetes
patients, but could be used to understand which types of treatments
work best in certain groups and why some populations are better at
managing diabetes than others.
He said the partnership could also help Novo Nordisk collect
real-world data on patients using its drugs, which in turn could be
used to strengthen its hand in negotiations with payers. It would
give Novo Nordisk the "ability to document what payers are really
getting," he said.
Novo Nordisk didn't disclose the financial details of the
partnership.
Write to Denise Roland at Denise.Roland@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 10, 2015 08:35 ET (13:35 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2015 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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