We have repeatedly told you about the Watson supercomputer, created by IBM engineers. What kind of roles this computer did not try on: it was a cook, a sales assistant, and even won a TV quiz. Not long ago, the Watson power was allowed into a new channel for him - he took up health care. Now the supercomputer will help analyze cancer tumors in order to find and calculate for patients the most effective set of therapeutic drugs.
Such an application of the IBM supercomputer is part of the US program for the development of personalized medicine. An oncological disease is the uncontrolled growth of cells resulting from a genetic mutation. Scientists have found that if they can identify which mutation is the cause of the cancer, then the disease can be treated much more effectively.
The main problem is that during DNA sequencing it is necessary to process such a huge amount of data that conventional computers hardly can do this, and if thousands of different gene mutations are taken into account, among which it is necessary to find the cause of the disease, then here it can just a supercomputer.
Oncologists hope that the power of Watson will help them solve the problem of huge amounts of data. DNA samples will be loaded into the computer, after which it will start looking for the cause of the cancer in the data obtained. After the desired mutation is found, Watson will begin to sort through all possible combinations of treatment with various drugs, since thousands of different clinical trials and data on already approved drugs are already loaded into it. IBM programmers spent about a year in order to prepare a supercomputer to solve such problems.
So far, only one thing is unclear: how many medical institutions will have to pay IBM for this kind of services and how many patients the supercomputer can help, provided that its capacity is probably not enough for everyone.
The article is based on materials .
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