IBM Watson, Teva partnership to create new medicines, tackle chronic diseases

IBM Watson and pharmaceutical company Teva will expand their existing global eHealth alliance to focus on two key healthcare challenges: The discovery of new treatment options and improving chronic disease management. Both projects will run on the IBM Watson Health Cloud. The partners jointly announced their expanded plans on October 26 at the World of Watson conference in Las Vegas. The partnership features a new, three-year research collaboration to develop cognitive technologies that enable a systematic approach to the emerging field of drug repurposing and deliver unprecedented scale in the discovery of new uses for existing drugs. The companies also announced that respiratory and central nervous system diseases would be the first targets for their chronic disease management initiative, which will be the first project to integrate data from The Weather Company - an IBM Business - into the analysis.