Major US drugmaker Pfizer will use IBM Watson Health’s artificial intelligence technology to help in its efforts to find new cancer medicines. The deal will use the Watson for Drug Discovery platform to expand its research in immuno-oncology and accelerate the identification of potential new treatments. The drugs giant said it is one of the first organizations worldwide to employ the technology, and the first to customize the cloud-based cognitive tool.

Israel’s Teva also announced last month that it would use IBM Watson Health Cloud computing technology to focus on new treatment options and improve the management of chronic diseases.

Pfizer researchers will use the computing technology to analyze huge volumes of disparate data sources, including licensed and publicly available information as well as the company’s proprietary data, and test hypotheses to generate what it termed “evidence-based insights for real-time interaction.”

"With the incredible volume of data and literature available in this complex field, we believe that tapping into advanced technologies can help our scientific experts more rapidly identify novel combinations of immune-modulating agents. We are hopeful that by leveraging Watson’s cognitive capabilities in our drug discovery efforts, we will be able to bring promising new immuno-oncology therapeutics to patients more quickly," said Mikael Dolsten, president of Pfizer worldwide research & development.

Lauren O’Donnell, vice president of life sciences at IBM Watson Health, added: “We believe that the next great medical innovations will emerge as researchers and scientists find new patterns in existing bodies of knowledge. In order to do this, they need access to R&D tools that can help them efficiently navigate the opportunities and challenges presented by the explosion of data globally.”

Launched in April 2015, the Watson for Drug Discovery platform contains 25 million Medline abstracts, more than 1 million full-text medical journal articles and 4 million patients, which can be expanded with a company’s own data, helping researchers to uncover hidden patterns. This compares with the 200 to 300 articles per year that the average researcher reads, according to a study by the University of Tennessee in February 2014.