IBM's Kovac welcomes age of information-based medicine

There are tremendous opportunities in personalised or information-based medicine, according to Carol Kovac, IBM's general manager for life sciences and healthcare. Kovac has come to Australia as a visiting international fellow for the InnovationXchange Network.

And IBM is in a perfect position to apply its vast experience to the life sciences and healthcare, Kovac says.

"This is a great space for us, we're very excited about the life sciences, we believe it has a tremendous amount of innovation that is yet to come ... and in the end I think all of it is really primarily focused on getting a better understanding of disease and hopefully being able to target disease on a molecular level such that we have some deep understandings and a better way to find therapies whether those are drugs or other kinds of therapies for disease," she told attendees at a Blue Sky Forum held by the InnovationXchange at Monash University in Melbourne -- one of three forums held across Australia.

When IBM started working in the life sciences and healthcare area in 2000, Kovac says, this was described as personalised medicine. There was a lot of talk about it and what it could offer, but because biological systems are so complex, people thought it would be a decade or more before any real personalised medicine was developed for the market.

"We believe that is not actually true," she says.

"We think there are other opportunities around personalised medicine, and would rather refer to it as information-based medicine. We believe that by starting to look at capturing a lot of data, different types of data, and doing that around patients and individuals and people -- whether they are sick as patients or well people -- and being able to integrate it, and our first thinking on this was integrating genotype and phenotype data. This is an area where we think tremendous insights about diseases, about genetic markers for disease will come from."

Characterising this approach to information-based medicine is the need to bring together huge amounts of data. IBM is working with a number of clients including the Mayo Clinic, which has data from 4.5 million patients, and Icelandic biotech company deCODE which has 100,000 patients plus ancestral records, among others.

"That makes it a really different beast to the kind of medical research that has been done in the past," Kovac says.

"Once you get these databases ... you don't have to have a hypothesis. You can take algorithms and use them to group sets of patients. Once you see the clustering then you can do the biology."

The mined data can then be used for a variety of purposes, such as finding new genes, going back and deciding how to treat these groups of patients to get the best outcome, and resurrecting orphan drugs.

But Kovac sees another opportunity with immense commercial value -- diagnostics.

"Once you start to have these biobanks of information, and start to mine them -- to say, I have these different clusters of patients that look like this and these guys look like that, and now I can say that this is the best treatment for this group and a different treatment for that group -- what you really have are all the elements of a more personalised form of medicine. It's not down to the individual, but it's a more personalised form of medicine," she says.

"To practice that, you now have to embody all of that into a diagnostic. It's that kind of methodology that is going to lead to a whole new opportunity -- creating better diagnostics for personalised therapies that create better outcomes for patients."

But care has to be taken to not accuse the implementation of powerful new technologies for the rise in health care costs, Kovac says. She says the problem is really that healthcare systems are broken -- they are not efficient, not very productive and in most cases still paper driven -- a horrifying thought for those in the IT business. She cites the US healthcare spend, which exceeds US$1.4 trillion annually, of which $450 billion is wasted productivity.

"All this technology I've been talking about, it gets blamed for driving the cost of healthcare up," Kovac says. "That offends me because new technology might be expensive but it brings real value. We have to take some of that waste out and make it more efficient so that we can spend some of that money on new technology."