IBM and Three Institutes Ink Cancer Research IT Pacts

IBM will provide $3 million in technology and services to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to create a integrated information management system, the company said Wednesday.

New York-based IBM's announcements are another example of the deal-making in the emerging new biology economy. In these cases, the company is providing its technology to go hand-in-hand with medical data, including genomic information, in an effort to provide a better insight into disease for the benefit of patients, and clinicians.

These are early stage efforts that deal with the goal of creating knowledge from medical data, but do not really address the scientific veracity of data such as biomarkers. That is another ongoing challenge for scientists and clinicians.

Working with New York City-based Memorial Sloan-Kettering, IBM will integrate hospital data with text mining and analysis tools to create a system for predictive analysis and research in cancer, as well as creating a searchable database by standardizing and extracting information from the center's repository of thousands of pathology reports.

IBM is also joining with the Molecular Profiling Institute and the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center-Mother and Child University Hospital Center under separate agreements announced today.

IBM and the Molecular Profiling Institute of Phoenix, Ariz., will collaborate to use molecular profiling technologies for application in the diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

In this project, IBM's information technology systems will be used to create a report based on a patient’s molecular profile, IBM said.

In a deal with Quebec's CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center-Mother and Child University Hospital Center, a university teaching hospital affiliated with the University of Montreal, IBM will collaborate with the institution to develop an informatics system, merging information from an individual patient file with genomic data to seek better defined genetic markers for acute lymphoblastic leukemia.