IBM Watson Health and Celgene Corporation, a biopharmaceutical company, have announced a partnership to develop an automated drug safety solution. IBM Watson for Patient Safety will collect data from EMRs, medical claims databases and other resources, to monitor it and report any adverse drug reactions.

"This partnership, at its outset, has the potential to create efficiencies in collection and collation of reports, as well as applying Watson cognitive computing to drive insights to inform important decision-making by drug safety experts, based on the report data," an IBM Watson Health spokesperson told HCB News.

Individual Case Safety Reports (ICSRs), which list the potential side effects of the drugs, are increasing in volume and becoming complex, because data sources are growing and regulations are changing. The solution will help biopharmaceutical companies and other stockholders better manage and interpret large amounts of ICSRs.
"Intensifying regulatory expectations, tougher inspection systems, and on-the-spot patient reporting are reshaping the environment of pharmacovigilance, the practice of monitoring for adverse effects of medical drugs among pharmaceutical companies," said the spokesperson. "This creates a new opportunity to use cognitive computing to address both the increasing volume and diversifying channels of safety events."

The solution will run on IBM's Watson Health Cloud and utilize Watson’s cognitive computing capabilities. That will enable it to understand structured and unstructured language to help make the decisions.

Celgene, which is headquartered in Summit, New Jersey, discovers, develops and commercializes therapies for cancer and inflammatory diseases. The company established one of the first risk management systems, according to IBM.

IBM and Celgene share the same goal to create a paradigm shift in how patient safety data is identified. They hope that this new approach can be applied across the products' entire life cycle, from early development to approval.

The companies are developing the solution in phases, and the first module is expected to be finished within the next year.

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