NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Munich Leukemia Laboratory (MLL) has begun a collaboration with IBM and Illumina to develop a new cognitive technology prototype for providing personalized leukemia and lymphoma treatments.
The project will use IBM's Watson and MLL will be the first European adopter of the Illumina high-throughput sequencing NovaSeq platform.
The collaboration ultimately aims to develop a method to analyze genomic and phenotypic data along with medical literature, guidelines, and study results, to give clinicians information relevant to leukemia care. The researchers will sequence samples from MLL's biobank and will use Watson to interpret the genomic data. The project will also use automated phenotyping and genotyping, including whole genome sequencing and transcriptome sequencing in 5,000 cases.
MLL will further utilize Illumina's BaseSpace Informatics Suite to streamline data analysis, storage, data curation, and aggregation. The BaseSpace Sequence Hub Frankfurt site will help MLL manage data as the project scales up, and will facilitate data transfer to IBM Watson. Tertiary analysis with BaseSpace Cohort Analyzer and BaseSpace Correlation Engine will allow MLL's genomic data to be combined with other clinical data to enhance interpretation.
Illumina announced a partnership with IBM earlier this year to integrate Watson for Genomics and Illumina's BaseSpace and tumor sequencing process, to standardize and simplify interpretation of genomic data.