|18 October 2016|
USA
A groundbreaking new partnership is set to transform healthcare by advancing the development of precision treatments.
Quest Diagnostics – a leader in genomic sequencing and oncology diagnostics – and IBM Watson Health have joined forces to launch IBM Watson Genomics from Quest Diagnostics: ‘a new service that helps advance precision medicine by combining cognitive computing with genomic tumor sequencing’.
And the world’s largest cancer centre, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) will add to the available data – Watson for Genomics processes around 10,000 scientific articles and 100 new clinical trials every month – with ‘a precision oncology knowledge base to help inform precision treatment options for cancer patients.’
“Precision medicine is changing the way we treat cancer and giving new hope to people living with the disease,” said Dr Jay Wohlgemuth, chief medical officer and senior vice president of research, development and medical, Quest Diagnostics. “However, access to genomic sequencing and tumour analysis required to determine appropriate precision medicine treatments for a patient can be a challenge. This service combines Quest’s state-of-the-art tumour analysis and national access with the cognitive computing of IBM’s Watson and the deep cancer treatment expertise of MSK. This is a powerful combination that we believe it will leap frog conventional genomic services as a better approach for identifying targeted oncology treatments.”
