Mayo Clinic and IBM Join To Speed Up Medical Advances

NASA Tech Briefs, Sep 2005

The Mayo Clinic and IBM have announced a collaboration to accelerate advances in patient care and research by taking advantage of new data to link research and medicine. The Mayo Clinic will be the first medical institution to use the power of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer to access special algorithms and advance its work in molecular modeling for disease research.

A primary focus of the collaboration is to create a standard means of integrating patient records, mapping current and historical patient data and linking them to new types of medical information. The next step is to mine the patient data and compare that to the data of other patients with similar disease characteristics.

"Wouldn't it be marvelous if a doctor knew not just the exact location of the patient's cancer, but its gene characteristics and the outcomes of therapy in the last 500 patients with cancer in that exact location and with those identical genetic characteristics?" said Dr. Hugh Smith, vice president of Mayo Clinic. "To do this, there needs to be a consistent way to link these kinds of data, not just in a single hospital, but regionally, nationally, and globally."

Other aspects of the collaboration include Mayo using IBM's deep computing capability to advance its work in genomic and proteomic research and molecular modeling, providing a way to identify disease causes and prevention.

Visit www.mayoclinic.org for more information.