UPDATED 16:24 EDT / OCTOBER 19 2013

MD Anderson Medical Center Announces Moon Shots Worldiwde Cancer Initiative

The University of Texas MD Anderson Medical Center and IBM Friday announced an ambitious plan to make the latest cancer research results, including ongoing trials, available to doctors worldwide. Anderson and IBM will attack the sometimes decade-long lag time between publication of research and its incorporation into general treatment for patients by making its Oncology Expert Advisor, built on IBM’s Watson cognitive computing engine, accessable to clinicians not only in the United States but around the world. It will provide the most advanced cancer treatments, tailored to the individual patient, wherever they may be needed. Beyond that, the Expert Advisor will provide a channel for clinicians to enrole patients in ongoing trials that are appropriate for the individual patient. It will feed data on the results of treatment pathways for tens of thousands of patients back to researchers to fuel the discovery of novel treatments.

“Imaging a world where cancer doesn’t exist,” said Lynda Chin, M.D., professor, and chair of Genomic Medicine, and scientific director of the Institute for Applied Cancer Science at MD Anderson. This is the goal of the institution’s new program, named Moon Shots, to bring the latest knowledge and resources of the institution to bear on cases worldwide. The institution picked leukemia, which causes nearly one-third of cancer deaths in children and adolescents younger than 15 according to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, as the initial target of the program, which will expand over time to cover all cancers.

Cancer is a genetic disease at heart, the Anderson experts said in the announcement. Each case is unique. The Oncology Expert Advisor, the product of a year of cooperative development between Anderson and IBM, goes far beyond cancer guidelines to provide detailed, evidence-based treatment recommendations for each individual patient, based on that patient’s genetics, medical history, and personal situation, including issues such as comorbidities, drug sensitivities and home environment. Watson provides several potential courses of action to the clinician, rated according to their efficacy, with full access to the underlying research to allow the clinician to make an informed decision on the best treatment regimen for the individual patient. And it updates its treatment recommendations over time, based on the patient’s response to treatment and on new research. This provides each patient with the best chance of a successful outcome.

But, Dr Lu said, the program also recognizes that “the best we can do today is not good enough.” Therefore, the recommendations include information on any ongoing clinical trials at Anderson that may be appropriate for the patient, providing a channel for patients to enroll in the most advanced treatments available.

Watson and the Oncology Expert Advisor is designed to solve a major problem in medicine today, and in particular in areas of intense research such as cancer. Medical knowledge doubles every five years. Huge numbers of articles are published in medical journals on the latest results. But physicians have very limited time to read those articles, and no human being can absorb all the research results being published and weigh the relative significance of each. Watson, however, can.

A new kind of cognative computer system, Watson has ingested millions of pages of research, most of it unstructured or semi-structured text and research results. It can apply all of this to the genetic, medical, and personal information of each individual patient, recommend several choices in treatment strategies taylored to that individual, and then refine or in some cases change the strategy selected as treatment progresses. It can evaluate patient responses to treatment and recognize which may indicate, for instance, the beginning of significant adverse reactions that require a rethinking of the strategy.

“Watson is the first of a new generation of cognative computing,” said Manoj Saxena, general manager of IBM Watson Solutions. “It learns the way we do and understands the full complexity of the language and of the presumed knowledge and implications surrounding a seemingly simple question.” Watson, he said, is the most significant IBM system in its potential impact on human lives and culture since the first IBM 360-65 mainframe, 70 years ago, that revolutionized computing.

Watson is expected to play a key role within Apollo, a technology-driven “adaptive learning environment” that MD Anderson is developing as part of its Moon Shots program. Apollo enables iterative collaboration between clinical care and research by creating an environment that streamlines and standardizes the longitudinal collection, ingestion, and integration of patient’s medical and clinical history, including unstructured medical and research notes and test results, with laboratory and research data in MD Anderson’s centralized patient data warehouse. This complex data then is made available for deep analysis with advanced analytics to extract novel insights that can lead to improved effectiveness of care and better patient outcomes.


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