Teva Pharmaceutical Industries has expanded its existing global e-Health alliance with IBM with a 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 expanded partnership features a new, three-year research collaboration to develop cognitive technologies that can enable a systematic approach to the emerging field of drug repurposing and deliver scale in the discovery of new uses for existing drugs. The companies also announced that respiratory and central nervous system (CNS) diseases will be the first targets for their chronic disease management initiative, which will integrate data from The Weather Company (an IBM Business) into the analysis. The joint work in chronic disease management emerges from Teva’s existing alliance with IBM as a Foundational Life Sciences Partner for the IBM Watson Health Cloud.

With respect to the discovery of new uses for existing drugs, the aim of the new collaboration between Teva and IBM Research is to design, build, and deploy a systematic process for drug repurposing. The process will combine human insight with machine-learning algorithms and real-world evidence accessed through the IBM Watson Health Cloud. IBM Watson Health Cloud technology will be applied with the aim of revealing previously hidden correlations between a drug molecule and health conditions.

To address the global impact of chronic diseases, Teva and IBM reveal are working together on an initiative that combines Teva’s therapeutic technologies with IBM Watson’s cognitive computing.The companies aim to enable patients, healthcare providers, and payers to better understand and control chronic conditions, and track treatments. The chronic disease management collaboration will combine cloud-connected drug delivery and app technology with more than six billion data points processed by Watson to provide actionable insights, including the integration of data from The Weather Company. Using Watson’s cognitive processing capabilities and newly developed algorithms these data may be used to calculate the prospective risk of health events, such as an asthma attack, with Teva delivering that information directly to caregivers and their patients via an app or other software interface.

Source: Teva Pharmaceutical Industries