AI Takes On Drug Safety

Big Blue has found yet another business application for its precocious cognitive computing system. IBM Watson Health is collaborating with the biopharmaceutical company Celgene to develop a new platform for evaluating the safety of drugs--both before and after they hit the market--the two companies are announcing this morning. The new offering, "Watson for Patient Safety," will gobble up anonymized medical records, claims data, and millions of electronic submissions to the FDA about potential drug side effects (known as individual case safety reports) to see if it can learn about the hidden dangers of medicines before they become too costly. The problem is one of the toughest in drug development. Many chemical agents (and maybe even most) interact with more than one "target"--meaning that if a drug has a molecular effect to begin with, it very likely will have one or more side effects.