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IBM Donates Use Of Watson To Veterans Health System As Part Of Biden's Cancer Moonshot

This article is more than 7 years old.

IBM is donating its Watson computers to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to analyze the genomes of 10,000 cancer patients.

The gift is being announced ahead of a summit being held this morning by Vice President Joseph Biden to discuss the Cancer Moonshot he is running for President Obama.

IBM wouldn’t be giving Watson to the VA were it not for the Moonshot project. Steve Harvey, the Vice President of Watson Health at IBM, says that the idea came about when IBM started looking for a way to help with the Moonshot. The VA, which treats 3.5% of American’s cancer patients, was looking for a way to expand its use of DNA analysis in cancer treatment. IBM Watson had already worked with the VA for a project involving mental health. (The project is completed, but no results have yet been made public.)

“Our precision oncology efforts have pretty much been focused on the areas where we have that kind of expertise in the VA system,” says David Shulkin, The Department of Veterans Affairs Under Secretary for Health. “This IBM Watson relationship allows us to dramatically move that faster by providing that to patients.”

Right now, a patient in New England or North Carolina whose cancer has grown resistant to standard drugs might get his DNA sequenced to help identify a new treatment. But that would be far less likely to happen in other areas of the country. The VA hopes that Watson can help it roll out this technology more broadly.

“It really shouldn’t matter whether you happen to live in Boston, were all these great medical centers are, or in New York or Houston,” says IBM’s Harvey. “If you live where I grew up in the Midwest you should have access to all the same information that all these leading oncologists are using.”

The analysis Watson is providing is not that different in concept by firms like Foundation Medicine or NantHealth, both of which will also handle DNA sequencing. (The VA sends patient samples to companies to have tumor DNA sequenced; Watson then handles analyzing those sequences.) IBM has also sold this service or made it available as part of a research collaboration to several dozen hospitals, Harvey says.

This is a great example of what a project like the Moonshot can accomplish by making connections and giving companies an incentive to make technology available more broadly. But it also shows the limits of what is inevitably a short-term project. This deal doesn’t create new medical evidence that proves that sequencing the DNA of tumors actually saves lives. Nor does it improve access for patients outside the VA. It doesn't tell us how good Watson is at this task, either.

Efforts like the Cancer Moonshot have trouble living up to their own hype. But they can grease the wheels of progress a little bit.