IBM, Mayo extend partnership to find 'Holy Grail' of health care

Computerworld - IBM and the Mayo Clinic yesterday announced the extension of a 3-year-old partnership designed to improve health care by correlating data from patient records to what Dr. Nina Schwenk, who heads Mayo's IT operations, calls "the Holy Grail [of medicine], individualized patient treatment" (see story).
Dr. Denis Cortese, president and CEO of the Mayo Clinic, predicted that the partnership could rapidly advance health care. "We are at a point with standards in technology and new genomic-based analytic techniques where we can achieve more in the next 10 years than we've achieved in the last 100, and we see in IBM a partner with a very unique capacity to deliver expertise and innovation," Cortese said in a statement.
IBM and the Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research, the formal name for the Rochester, Minn-based nonprofit health care organization, which operates clinics in Rochester, Jacksonville, Fla., and Scottsdale, Ariz., have spent the past two years mining data from the records of 4.4 million Mayo patients.
Now, the partnership wants to mine patient information in new ways and compare it with data from other patients with similar disease characteristics and genomic makeup, said Schwenk, who also serves on the board of governors of the Mayo Foundation. The partnership also plans to use the data to fine-tune treatment.
"Wouldn't it be marvelous if a doctor knew not just the exact location of the patient's cancer but its gene characteristics and the outcomes of therapy in the last 500 patients with cancer in that identical location and with those identical genetic characteristics?" Dr. Hugh Smith, vice president of the Mayo Clinic, said in a statement.
Individualized care could one day replace today's protocol-driven treatments, Schwenk said. Instead of treating cancer patients using a toxic stew of chemotherapy -- which can have debilitating side effects -- drugs could be tailored to a patient's genetic make up and particular cancer. Mayo and IBM will base treatments on information from the patient as well as on continuing genomic research, Schwenk said.
Data mining should allow Mayo doctors to zero in on successful treatments by harvesting information on related cases and the therapies and drugs that produced the best results, Schwenk said.
IBM intends to use its Blue Gene supercomputer on the project to advance its work in molecular modeling for disease research, said Drew Flaada, IBM 's director of the Mayo/IBM partnership. He said Mayo researchers would use Blue Gene to do "deep computing and deep science," including mathematical modeling and a simulation of gene structures tohelp predict disease behavior.
The partnership uses IBM pSeries servers based on the RISC PowerPC chip running the AIX operating system and an IBM DB2 database. The Blue Gene supercomputer, which is located at an IBM facility in Rochester near Mayo's headquarters, has a theoretical computing capacity of 360 TFLOPS and currently ranks as the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world, IBM said.
Schwenk declined to specify the funding for the Mayo/IBM partnership, but said it is "significant -- a lot of zeros on both sides," and said IBM plans to do research to develop systems, products and tools for the health care industry.