NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – IBM Research is collaborating with the Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori in Italy to develop a biomedical analytics platform that they said may lead to more individualized healthcare in a broad range of disease areas.
Doctors at the institute are testing the platform, dubbed Clinical Genomics, to personalize treatments based on automated interpretation of pathology guidelines "and intelligence from a number of past clinical cases, documented in the hospital information system," IBM and the institute said in a joint statement today.
The institute is based in Milan, Italy and focuses on pre-clinical and clinical oncology.
Clinical Genomics integrates and analyzes clinical information and guidelines, and then correlates it with patient data — such as a patient's age, weight, family history, current state of the disease, and general health — "to create evidence that supports a specific course of treatment for each patient."
The solution, IBM and the institute said, could provide doctors with a clearer picture of the patient-care process and enable them to make better treatment decisions, reducing costs in the process.
"Our clinical genomics solution may enable caregivers to personalize treatment and increase its chances of success," Haim Nelken, senior manager of integration technologies at IBM Research-Haifa, said in the joint statement. "The solution is designed to provide physicians with recommendations that go beyond the results of clinical trials. It may allow them to go deeper into the data and more accurately follow the reasoning that led to choices previously made on the basis of subjective memory, intuition, or clinical trial results."
Clinical Genomics could lead to better care in a number of disease areas including cancer management, hypertension, and AIDS care, the partners said.