It used to be one-size-fits-all. You were diagnosed with cancer and you got the protocol, no matter how it might work for you.
I learned the hard way. When my cancer recurred after two years, I wished I’d had a treatment specifically tailored to my genes and my type of cancer. That was seven years ago. Today, thanks to IBM Watson, it’s here.
Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center (MSKCC) has announced plans to partner with IBM’s Watson to develop a powerful tool to help improve the ability of healthcare providers to “personalize” treatments to cancer patients’ specific needs.
It’s a win-win. Doctors will be better able to fashion treatment to the patient. Patients’ outcomes should improve. And the sky-rocketing costs of treatment should be reduced, it’s hoped, if more patients remain healthy and cancer-free.
To accomplish this, MSKCC will provide its expertise in cancer treatment and IBM's Watson's will use it to rapidly process information from a variety of sources, according to IBM, allowing doctors to be able to provide individualized cancer treatment options and diagnoses for patients.
Watson can process 200 million pages of information in less than 3 seconds, according to IBM, and once it’s loaded with oncology information, it will be able to begin targeting therapies for individual patients at MSKCC.
The American Cancer Society estimates that 12 million people with cancer in the U.S. were alive in 2008, the last year for which records are available. Almost 2 million new cases will be diagnosed this year in this country, according to the American Cancer Society (ACA). And over half a million people will die of this disease in 2012, the ACA says. One in four of us will develop it in our lifetimes.
IBM says the goal of the MSKCC and IBM Watson project is “to give oncologists based anywhere the ability to obtain detailed, up-to-date diagnostic and treatment recommendations for their patients,” even patients in rural areas, where healthcare is sometimes hard to come by, will eventually also be able to benefit from the MSKCC/IBM Watson partnership.
“Physicians require a lot more information to make the proper decision as we learn more about the biology of cancer,” Martin Kohn, IBM’s chief medical scientist, told Beth Jinks of businessweek.com in an interview. Using Watson “we have access to much more information than we could possibly accomplish by reading on our own, or even 100 people reading.”
To be sure, cancer care outcomes have certainly improved, largely due to research that is being conducted on many levels. But research produces mountains of data and this data must be aggregated aggregated, interpreted, then disseminated, something impossible to do with computers as they existed in the past. “With medical information doubling every five years, finding new ways to make evidence-based decisions has never been more critical,” IBM reports in a press release.
Previously, that meant years, often with the results coming too late for many patients with advanced disease. Now there is new hope that patients with advanced disease may see many more years of life.
Edited by
Jennifer Russell
