Harnessing IBM Watson to Accelerate ALS Research and Treatment Discoveries (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Now we come to Watson, who is Bram Stoker and the wager. Hello.

Speaker 2: For me, the personal part is it's going to allow people to live life, to be able... My statement is love life, live life. I want everyone to be able to do that. And if we can speed up treatment drugs and eventually find a cure, they're going to be able to watch their daughter graduate, see them get married, have grandkids.

Speaker 1: We wanted to accelerate our discovery process. So we wanted to use IBM Watson to help us explore new angles and help us discover new insights into the disease in a far more rapid way than we could individually.

Speaker 3: That expertise that we get from the Barrow Institute, in the case of ALS, trains Watson to understand the topic. So that as Watson is reading through the scientific literature and doing the comparison of data and looking for these connections and patterns, Watson understands what it's seeing. The key to Watson is that pattern recognition and that ability to understand reason and learn to see patterns in data that the human mind might have a bias against.

Speaker 1: As Watson providing us answers that we would have no expectations to get by ourselves and the speed in which it can do that. And so by giving us all these new genes that have never been linked to ALS before and would take us years to uncover and link, it doing so in an incredibly rapid manner, that's the most exciting thing to us. Three, two, one.

Speaker 2: Because the ice bucket challenge and the attention that that brought were double the number of compounds that they've been testing for medicines, now they can apply those to these new genes that they've identified that are common in ALS patients.

Speaker 3: It could be my family member, it could be your family member, it could be my neighbor. Any of these tools could potentially impact. So it's a great combination of man and machine, if you will, to really impact humanity.