KwaZulu-Natal Research Institute and IBM Research fight tuberculosis in South Africa

IBM’s Big Data analytics technologies will be put to work on bacterial genetics and drug susceptibility tests to better understand the genomic mechanisms that cause resistance to antibiotics. The ultimate goal is to find new treatments and diagnostic approaches to fight TB.

K-RITH associate investigator Dr Alex Pym noted that the agreement with IBM is a significant collaboration that gives South African scientists access to IBM’s computational expertise in bioinformatics and machine learning.

"This will allow us to analyze data in new and imaginative ways and it holds the promise of giving us better insight into the mechanisms of drug resistance, leading to better diagnostic tests," Dr Pym added..

The science has benefitted from IBM’s global network of research labs and world leading expertise in computational biology. Researchers from the Haifa, Melbourne, and Africa labs are working together to analyze over 200 TB genomes, each with 4.4 million base pairs, to better understand the complex clinical picture of African tuberculosis infections.

IBM’s work on other solutions, including the well known EuResist programme, developed to help physicians select the optimal treatments for HIV patients, have paved the way for the use of bioinformatics in disease treatment.

EuResist combines large databases and new prediction engines to provide predictive modeling of how HIV would react in a particular person treated with specific combination of drugs. This system, available since 2008, is the world’s largest database containing clinical and genomic information on HIV.

Sequencing of the KRITH strains was performed by the Broad Institute, a world leader in genomics, with funding from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the US National Institutes of Health.

Analysis of sequencing data from the K-RITH strains and other organizations in South Africa was given first priority due to the magnitude of TB drug resistance in that country.

The research work at IBM and K-RITH can interact with global initiatives like TBresist, and with leadership and collaboration from organizations such as the CDC Foundation.

The intent is to add data from different parts of the world, from different strains of TB, to culture a global database that researchers and physicians can use to determine the best treatment to combat a particular strain of tuberculosis.

The impact of this would be more effective treatments for patients and a reduction of the cost of treating tuberculosis in Africa and potentially around the world.

In similar news, last week the New York Genome Center and IBM announced that they will test a unique IBM Watson prototype designed specifically for genomic research as a tool to help oncologists deliver more personalized care to cancer patients.