The White House announced a slew of new initiatives as part of its Cancer Moonshot program, including partnerships in the technology industry.
Among them was the reveal that IBM and its supercomputer Watson have joined the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) to treat as many as 10,000 veterans with cancer. The computer’s technology will be provided for free to the VA for two years, according to The Washington Post, and will be used to analyze genomic data, pinpoint potential cancer-causing mutations and identify potential treatments.
David Shulkin, the VA's undersecretary for health, told The Post that Watson’s technology will allow patients to be treated and data analyzed more quickly. Steve Harvey, vice president of Watson Health, told the newspaper that early tests of the artificial intelligence program at cancer centers yielded positive results, and that it may be especially useful in rural areas and smaller cities.
"A lot of what Watson does is synthesize available information and produce a fact-based report that the human brain can’t do in such a short period of time," Harvey told The Post. "It will give someone who lives in rural America the sort of treatment available in Houston and New York."
The VA-IBM partnership was not the only technology-based initiative revealed by Vice President Joe Biden at the Cancer Moonshot Summit, held Wednesday at Howard University in the District of Columbia, the White House announced. The new programs include:
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The Department of Energy and the National Cancer Institute will partner on three pilot projects designed to unite cancer physicians, medical researchers, computer scientists and engineers to use supercomputer technologies to analyze cancer surveillance and preclinical data. The end goal is to determine causes of cancer development to better develop treatments that are effective and less toxic.
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Foundation Medicine will more than double the number of patients included in the NCI’s Genomic Data Commons, which will increase its total to more than 32,000 patients since its launch earlier this month. The program promotes broad sharing of genomic data for research purposes.
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The VA will also partner with DOE to apply the computers at the Department of Energy’s National Labs to close to 500,000 veterans’ medical records through the Million Veterans program. The program is funded for 5 years, according to the announcement, with $3.5 million allocated for the 2016 fiscal year. The first phase will focus on cancer, cardiovascular disease and mental illness, accelerating research programs into new treatments and disease detection and prevention measures
- read The Post article
- here’s the White House announcement