Celgene, IBM Watson Health partner to develop patient safety monitoring tool

Celgene and IBM Watson Health announced Tuesday a collaboration to co-develop IBM Watson for Patient Safety, which the companies said is an offering that will run on the Watson Health Cloud "to enhance pharmacovigilance methods used to collect, assess, monitor and report adverse drug reactions."

John Freeman, Celgene's corporate vice president of global drug safety and risk management, remarked that "with this collaboration, we intend to create a paradigm shift in identifying patient safety data that we hope can be applied across the entire product lifecycle - from early development through to approved medicines." He added that IBM Watson for Patient Safety "will bring the cognitive computing power of Watson and its growing view of clinical, research and social health data to bear on this critical healthcare challenge."

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Specifically, the collaboration will combine Celgene's experience in drug safety and risk management with Watson’s cognitive computing ability "in order to create an outcome- and evidence-based drug safety decision support system for life science companies," the parties said. Watson for Patient Safety is being developed "as a first-of-its-kind, highly automated drug-safety offering designed to enable the rapid collection, collation and automated analysis of high volumes of data from diverse sources," the companies noted. Celgene and IBM Watson Health added that the offering will be developed in phases, with the first module expected within the next year.

Celgene and IBM Watson Health noted that the offering will drive pharmaceutical companies' understanding of complex safety questions, and help companies "better manage and interpret large volumes of individual case safety reports describing potential side effects associated with drug products." 

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