Apollo Hospitals joins hands with IBM Watson for cancer treatment

Apollo Hospitals on Tuesday adopted IBM's cognitive computing platform Watson for Oncology and Genomics in 10 of its cancer care hospitals.

These platforms will help physicians provide patients with personalised, evidence-based cancer care.

"Each person's cancer journey is unique and hence each patient's treatment plan must be unique too. IBM Watson for Oncology and Genomics will help the clinicians and oncologists at Apollo Hospitals augment their own expertise to deliver an unparalleled and personalised patient care across our hospitals,” said Preetha Reddy, Vice Chairperson of the Apollo Hospitals Group.

The services will be available at the hospital chain’s Chennai and Delhi units beginning this month, followed by Hyderabad, Mumbai, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar and Madurai over the next few months.

According to a World Health Organisation report, there are an estimated 949,000 new cancer cases in India annually, accounting for more than 634,000 lakh deaths related to cancer each year.

As healthcare providers seek to enable data-driven cancer care, the IBM platform will help analyse massive bodies of genomic, clinical and pharmacological knowledge to help uncover potential therapeutic options to target genetic alterations in a patient’s tumour.

Using this genomic analysis, Watson produces a report for physicians, which identifies genetic alterations that are actionable based on literature as well as drugs and clinical trials that target those alterations.