IBM's Watson takes aim at cancer

IBM Research and the New York Genome Center want to prove that IBM's Watson can dramatically reduce the time required to identify the most effective cancer treatments based on an analysis of a specific patient's genetic mutations. In partnership with regional hospitals, the NYGC plans to evaluate Watson's ability to help oncologists develop more personalized care for patients with glioblastoma, an aggressive and malignant brain cancer that kills more than 13,000 people in the US each year. The NYGC is a nonprofit consortium of the state's academic, medical, and university leaders working to advance the applications of genomics, the branch of genetics that studies complete DNA sequences rather than individual genes.