Watson at Work

The product of years of IBM research, the computer known as Watson will soon go to work for drug companies. The technology is the resulted from several years of work between IBM Research and four companies: AstraZeneca, Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont and Pfizer.

The program sorts through millions of patent filings and biomedical journals to look for chemical compounds used in drug discovery. It searches for the names of compounds, related words, drawings of the compounds, the names of companies working with specific chemicals and molecules, and the names of scientists who created the patented inventions.

The technology is said to be applicable to product strategy all the way to recruiting patent enforcement. I.B.M. is also adding to a searchable chemical database housed by the National Institutes of Health. The company is contributing more than 2.4 million chemical compounds extracted from 4.7 million patents and 11 million biomedical journal extracts from 1976 to 2000.

The information was all published, but often in costly scientific journals or buried in the mountains of patent filings. It was so difficult to access that it was, for all practical purposes, inaccessible. Most of the data will be on patents that have already expired, useful for scientific research but far less useful commercially.

I thought this was a great example of how we are adapting technology to further help us in the medical field. It is making information readily available without all the research hours previously needed. It is also allowing the information to be available to the masses.

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/08/ibms-watson-technologies-looks-for-drugs/?scp=3&sq=biomedical&st=cse