Initiative to help drive open standards for integrating genomic research with clinical patient data, to help reduce healthcare costs, improve patient care and provide more targeted treatment
IBM and Affymetrix have announced a global initiative to speed the adoption of a new information-based approach to medicine.
The far-reaching collaboration is designed to help medical centres, pharmaceutical companies, and research institutions use advanced technologies to integrate genomic research data with patient clinical data, to help reduce healthcare costs, improve patient care and provide more targeted treatment solutions.
IBM and Affymetrix will combine powerful open standards technologies, including the Affymetrix GeneChip technology and IBM professional services in areas such as regulatory compliance, business integration, and systems integration.
The IBM/Affymetrix initiative directly aligns with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Roadmap for accelerating medical discovery and applying knowledge about the human genome to diagnosing and treating diseases and improving health.
The H Lee Moffitt cancer centre and research institute at the University of South Florida is collaborating with IBM and Affymetrix to design innovative clinical trials that take into account the latest genetic research findings, and determine tailored treatment options for Moffitt patients.
"At Moffitt, we're committed to adopting the latest technologies to help researchers and clinicians speed cancer screening and diagnosis," said William Dalton, Moffitt Cancer Center.
"In order to quickly identify patients at risk and select potential clinical trial participants, we constantly seek out new solutions.
"Taking advantage of IBM's data integration services and life sciences expertise along with the Affymetrix GeneChip technology could lead to revolutionary ways to target cancer treatment".
The IBM-Affymetrix solution is being designed to enable genetic data, such as how genes are expressed in a disease state, to be cross-referenced with patient data, including medical histories and lab tests.
This data integration will make it quicker and easier to translate research findings into new, more individualised therapies and diagnostics.
It will also help clinical trial investigators choose the best potential candidates for clinical trials - and help improve trial successes - by matching patient history with a particular genetic profile. "The Mayo Clinic Cancer Center is a pioneer in translating biomedical research discoveries into the improvement of patient care," said Frank Prendergast, director, Mayo Clinic Comprehensive Cancer Center.
"The future of cancer care lies in the convergence of well characterised clinical data on clinical specimens and high-throughput research information. "The IBM and Affymetrix partnership is an important demonstration of the platforms that will be needed to realise this vision".
IBM and Affymetrix plan to work with research organisations, pharmaceutical companies, academic medical research institutions, and other organisations to promote open standards and new protocols for cross-organisational and cross-disciplinary integration of patient information with genomic and molecular research data.
These collaborative efforts can help to build the infrastructure required to take advantage of the NIH Roadmap.
This initiative will enable the type of cooperative research envisioned by the Federation of Clinical Immunology Societies (Focis).
Focis has centres of excellence comprised of clinician scientists from 28 major US medical centres in numerous fields of study who are exploring the use of similar treatments for dissimilar diseases.
"The integration of different types of data, from different Focis centers around the country is crucial for our group to study diseases in detail across organ and disease boundaries," said Garry Fathman, professor of medicine at Stanford and chairman of Focis. "The collaborative work that Focis is doing, and which this IBM/Affymetrix initiative is enabling, represents the future of research in immune mediated diseases and we are very excited about its potential to drive discovery at Focis."
