IBM Launches New Solution for Emerging Field of Personalized Medicine

IBM Clinical Genomics Solution Provides the Technology Infrastructure to Help Accelerate Information-Based Medicine

IBM today announced a new information technology (IT) solution designed to assist medical researchers and physicians bridge the gap between clinical research and patient care. By offering services and technology to identify the molecular mechanisms of disease and ultimately develop more personalized medicine, the IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences Clinical Genomics Solution is designed to further information-based medicine, a new way in which healthcare is developed and delivered.

The IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences Clinical Genomics Solution enables research institutions and biopharmaceutical companies across the world to integrate, store, analyze and better understand genotypic and phenotypic data for medical research and patient care. Critical components of the solution include business consultant services, business strategy and process re-engineering, and:

The Medical Information: interfaces with hospital and research systems to capture and de-identify information from each patient or research encounter, helping to ensure patient security and privacy

The Medical Information Broker: pulls data from multiple healthcare institutions and diagnostic laboratories to be stored in the Medical Information Repository

The Medical Information Repository: centralizes data for integrated clinical and high-throughput research, enabling an organization to fully leverage its information assets

IBM DB2 ® Information Integrator: Helps increase researchers’ productivity by providing seamless access to additional data in external databases such as Medline, dbSNP and GenBank

IBM Business Partner Platforms: complete solution through powerful technologies offered by IBM Business Partners

“Globally, healthcare is undergoing a profound transformation toward targeted therapeutics and treatment regimens. Working with our Business Partners, IBM is deeply committed to shedding light on the critical role information technology will play in personalized medicine,” said Mike Svinte, vice president, information-based medicine, IBM. “We’ve built our clinical genomics services practice to aid this transformation by enhancing drug discovery and medical practices with knowledge generated from diverse clinical and biomedical data. Our new solution will help clients achieve this vision of information-based medicine by accelerating our understanding of disease.”

The IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences Clinical Genomics Solution reflects IBM’s deep commitment to advancing healthcare and life sciences and leverages cutting-edge work by IBM Research as well as companies such as the Mayo Clinic and the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center and Research Institute.

Information-based medicine is the use of IT to cross-reference clinical information — such as patient records, family histories and lab tests — with knowledge about the human genome. By understanding illnesses on the molecular level, including gene variations linked to disease or drug response, doctors may be able to make more precise diagnoses and tailor treatment decisions. Similarly, drug makers can work to develop more targeted treatment therapies and identify potential clinical trail participants more effectively.

The IBM Healthcare and Life Sciences Clinical Genomics Solution can help facilitate companies’ compliance with rigorous patient privacy and security standards, such as HIPAA. Every implementation leverages IBM’s security framework, which is based on the Tivoli® suite of products. Tivoli applications help institutions define consistent security policies — based on both internal requirements and industry standards — and monitor compliance. Other products used in the clinical genomics solution include the IBM ® pSeries®, IBM DB2 Universal Database® and IBM WebSphere® Portal Server.