Enterprise IT vendor IBM today announced IBM’s Watson Discovery Advisor, a cloud service, enabling researchers to discover unknown connections in Big Data and speed up their discoveries.
IBM’s Watson Discovery Advisor reduces the time needed to test hypotheses and formulate conclusions that can advance their research and development work.
Watson Discovery Advisor can understand the language of science, such as how chemical compounds interact.
In fact, researchers and scientists have begun deploying IBM’s new Watson Discovery Advisor to analyze and test hypotheses using data in scientific papers available in public databases.
For instance, top life sciences organizations including Baylor College of Medicine, Johnson & Johnson and The New York Genome Center are deploying Watson Discovery Advisor to advance discoveries in ongoing research projects.
Watson Discovery Advisor is significant because a typical researcher reads about 23 scientific papers per month, which translates to nearly 300 per year.
In 2013, the top 1,000 research and development companies spent more than $600 billion annually on research alone. They take an average of 10 to 15 years for a promising pharmaceutical treatment to progress from the initial research stage into practice.
Watson Discovery Advisor assists researchers to uncover new relationships and recognize unexpected patterns among data that have the potential to improve the discovery process in research and science, said IBM.
Mike Rhodin, senior vice president, IBM Watson Group, said: “Today’s announcement is an extension of Watson’s cognitive computing capability. We’re empowering researchers with a powerful tool which will help increase the impact of investments organizations make in R&D.”
IBM shared some of the client achievements.
Baylor College of Medicine scientists used the Baylor Knowledge Integration Toolkit (KnIT), based on Watson technology, to accurately identify proteins that modify p53, an important protein related to many cancers, which can eventually lead to better efficacy of drugs and other treatments.
Watson analyzed 70,000 scientific articles on p53 to predict proteins that turn on or off p53’s activity. This automated analysis led the Baylor cancer researchers to identify six potential proteins to target for new research.
Johnson & Johnson will use the IBM Watson Discovery Advisor to read and understand scientific papers that detail clinical trial outcomes used to develop and evaluate medications and other treatments. This collaboration hopes to accelerate comparative effectiveness studies of drugs, which help doctors match a drug with the right set of patients to maximize effectiveness and minimize side effects.
