NEW YORK – IBM and the Cleveland Clinic said Tuesday that they have forged a 10-year partnership to establish the Discovery Accelerator for healthcare and life sciences research using high-performance cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing.
The Discovery Accelerator will provide the technology infrastructure base for Cleveland Clinic's new Global Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health, which is focused on understanding viral pathogens, virus-induced cancers, genomics, immunology, and immunotherapies. The health system launched that center in February with the help of a $500 million investment that includes support from the state of Ohio and Jobs Ohio, a nonprofit economic development corporation.
As part of the Discovery Accelerator, IBM will install the first private-sector, on-premises instance of its IBM Quantum System One commercial quantum computing platform on the main Cleveland Clinic campus. IBM also said it would later build the first instance of its next-generation, 1,000-qubit quantum system there.
"The COVID-19 pandemic has spawned one of the greatest races in the history of scientific discovery — one that demands unprecedented agility and speed," IBM Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna said in a statement.
"At the same time, science is experiencing a change of its own — with high-performance computing, hybrid cloud, data, AI, and quantum computing being used in new ways to break through long-standing bottlenecks in scientific discovery," Krishna added. "Our new collaboration with Cleveland Clinic will combine their world-renowned expertise in healthcare and life sciences with IBM's next-generation technologies to make scientific discovery faster, and the scope of that discovery larger than ever."
Cleveland Clinic CEO and President Tom Mihaljevic said that the technology will "help revolutionize" life sciences research. "The Discovery Accelerator will enable our renowned teams to build a forward-looking digital infrastructure and help transform medicine, while training the workforce of the future and potentially growing our economy," he said.