IBM Watson Health, a business unit of IBM focused on cloud-based cognitive computing for healthcare solutions, has selected Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. as its first Foundational Life Sciences Partner for the Watson Health Cloud. As part of this new strategic partnership, Teva becomes the first global pharmaceutical company to use the Watson Health Cloud. Teva has chosen the IBM Watson Health Cloud as a preferred global technology platform, and a joint Teva-IBM Research team will deploy Big Data and machine learning technology to create disease models and advanced therapeutic solutions.

Watson is a cognitive computing platform with capabilities to interact in natural language, process vast amounts of Big Data for understanding patterns and insights, and learning from each interaction. The Watson Health Cloud provides an open development platform for physicians, researchers, insurers, and companies.

Teva will work with IBM on long-range platform and solutions development, with experts collaborating to enhance IBM Watson Health Cloud capabilities and to explore synergies with existing Watson Health ecosystem partners. IBM’s Global Business Services will work with a Teva analytics team to assess the data and the analytics model requirements for a real-world evidence e-health solution.

In January 2014, IBM launched the IBM Watson unit, a business dedicated to developing and commercializing cloud-delivered cognitive computing technologies. The move signified a strategic shift by IBM to deliver a new class of software, services, and apps that improves by learning, and discovers insights from massive amounts of Big Data. As part of the unit, the company has increased the number and diversity of cognitive computing services delivered to its partners, adding new beta Watson services in February 2015, and scalable deep learning application programming interfaces (APIs) with the acquisition of AlchemyAPI in March 2015.

In April 2015, the company launched IBM Watson Health and the Watson Health Cloud platform. The new unit will help improve the ability of doctors, researchers, and insurers to innovate by surfacing new insights from the massive amount of personal health data being created daily. The Watson Health Cloud allows this information to be anonymized, shared, and combined with a dynamic, aggregated view of clinical, research and social health data that clients choose to share.

Source: IBM