IBM teams up with Teva for global eHealth collaboration

Will also partner with ICON on cancer trials project

IBM has signed deals with Teva and ICON that will see the firms use services based on its Watson supercomputer.

The agreement with Teva will involve the development of global eHealth solutions using the Watson Health Cloud by IBM and the Israeli company.

Teva becomes the first pharmaceutical firm to sign-up to use the development platform and aims to use it to target complex and chronic conditions such as asthma, pain, migraine and neurodegenerative diseases.

The partners will also harness big data and machine learning technology to create disease models and advanced therapeutic solutions.

Guy Hadari, SVP and CIO for Teva Pharmaceutical Industries, said: “Teva is actively exploring the e-health evolution with a strong focus on fulfilling unmet and emerging patients’ needs. The IBM Watson Health Cloud provides a strong foundation on which we can realise this vision.

“By building on the Watson Health Cloud, we believe Teva will be in a unique position to put the best information and insights in the hands of physicians, care teams and patients, to empower treatment optimisation for individuals and populations across the spectrum of acute and chronic conditions.”

As part of the collaboration IBM’s Global Business Services arm will work closely with a Teva analytics team to assess the data and the analytics model requirements for a real world evidence e-health solution.

Clinical trial matching

Meanwhile, IBM’s deal with contract research organisation ICON will see it target patient recruitment with a Watson-powered ‘instantaneous clinical trial matching solution’.

This will be applied to breast, lung, colon and rectal cancer trials and aims to allow ICON to instantly tell trial sponsors how many patients match their trial criteria and where they’re located.

Despite the industry’s best efforts, patient recruitment remains costly and ineffective, with more than $1.3bn spent on it each year while in oncology cancer patient participation remains at the 2-5% mark.

ICON’s chief operating officer Dr Steve Cutler said: “Recruiting the required number of patients for clinical trials is a constant challenge for our customers and can represent more than 30% of total study costs.

“By applying IBM Watson to our clinical trials, we have the potential to revolutionise clinical trial feasibility, patient recruitment and study start-up timelines which will help our customers take significant time and cost from their development programmes.”

Under its deal with ICON, IBM’s Watson Health Cloud will enable the CRO to access de-identified patient data, including the 50 million patient records from Explorys, which IBM acquired in April.

Source PMLive http://www.pmlive.com/blogs/digital_intelligence/archive/2015/october/ibm_teams_up_with_teva_for_global_ehealth_collaboration_832751

IBM teams up with Teva for global eHealth collaboration