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news.Teva Pharmaceutical Industries and IBM have expanded their worldwide e-health alliance with new projects designed to discover new uses for existing drugs and advance chronic disease management.
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The companies did not disclose the value of the expanded collaboration, which features a new, three-year research partnership.
Under the partnership, the companies will develop cognitive technologies to design, build, and deploy a systematic process for drug repurposing.
The companies said the process will combine human insight with machine-learning algorithms and real-world evidence accessed via the IBM Watson Health Cloud, for which Teva serves as a foundational life sciences partner.
IBM Watson Health Cloud technology will be applied on a massive scale with an intention to reveal earlier hidden correlations between a drug molecule and health conditions.
The companies also said respiratory and central nervous system diseases will be the first targets for a chronic disease management initiative.
The initiative will combine cloud-connected drug delivery and app technology with over six billion data points processed by Watson to offer actionable insights.
The data will use Watson’s cognitive processing capabilities and newly developed algorithms for calculating the prospective risk of health events like an asthma attack.
Teva will provide that data directly to healthcare providers and their patients through an app or other software interface.
The companies intend to enable patients, healthcare providers, and payers to better understand and control chronic conditions, as well as track treatments.
Teva president of global R&D and chief scientific officer Michael Hayden said: “This collaboration will bring together the science and the technology to scale up ‘serendipity’ to an industrial level, opening up new and exciting possibilities to create novel treatments for patients based on existing medicines.”
IBM Fellow and director of healthcare & life sciences for
“Using cognitive technologies to mine this data could reveal novel therapies for diseases that desperately need tackling. By teaming up with Teva, our belief is we will gain insights that can lead pharmaceutical companies to develop new medicines that benefit patients worldwide.”
Image: Teva Canada Centre of Excellence for Penicillin Products – Address: 575 Hood Road, markham, Ontario. Photo: courtesy of Raysonho @ Open Grid Scheduler / Grid Engine.