Leaders in Pharmaceutical Business Intelligence (LPBI) Group

IBM’s Watson Health division – How will the Future look like?

Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN

3.4.5   IBM’s Watson Health division – How will the Future look like?, Volume 2 (Volume Two: Latest in Genomics Methodologies for Therapeutics: Gene Editing, NGS and BioInformatics, Simulations and the Genome Ontology), Part 2: CRISPR for Gene Editing and DNA Repair

Comment regarding Technology companies:

On April 18, 2019, IBM halting sales of Watson AI tool for drug discovery – STAT

https://www.statnews.com/2019/04/18/ibm-halting-sales-of-watson-for-drug-discovery/?utm_source=STAT+Newsletters

LPBI Group’s view on this news from IBM has few parts:

• We believe that IBM needed to reorganize its application development efforts using AI in the Watson Business Unit. Drug discovery was targeted for downsizing. Watson will continue development of applications for Diagnosis applications. The realignment at IBM Watson is related to performance in the last three quarters when revenues decrease was recorded.
• IBM will focus on other health units to compete with Oracle’s venturez in Health.
• Watson requires high performance most sophisticated hardware and software. This was IBM focus on the high end computing machines since mid 70s with Series 360. They will not abandon that mission to be #1 in the World in high end market.
• LPBI Group’s IP is most suited for IBM Watson for Diagnosis. Therefore we as a Team decided not to remove IBM Watson from our Opportunities Map.
• We will prioritize among the players in the IT Sector and IBM will be the second tier for 2019-2020.

STAT News: The past year has been a tumultuous one for IBM’s Watson Health division.

In June, the team that manages the supercomputer once touted as a revolution in cancer care started to scale back its hospital business, citing weak demand. In July, internal IBM documents revealed that the supercomputer often delivered cancer treatment advice that was not only incorrect, but unsafe for patients as well. In November, a mass exodus began to erode the elite team of medical specialists and engineers tasked with fixing the artificial intelligence software. And in December, Watson Health’s fallback strategy — expanding operations in China — began to unravel.

In spite of all of this, IBM CEO Ginni Rometty kicked off 2019 with a bold statement — that IBM would not roll back its use of Watson in health care. But as STAT national technology correspondent Casey Ross reported last week, IBM is now halting its development and sales of a drug discovery and development product that uses Watson artificial intelligence software.

For more stories like this from health tech industry giants like IBM, Amazon, Google, and Apple, subscribe to STAT Plus today. Members enjoy unlimited access to STAT Plus stories, subscriber-only networking events across the country, and intelligence reports on key industry trends.

SOURCE

From: STAT Plus <marketing@statnews.com>

Reply-To: STAT Plus <marketing@statnews.com>

Date: Wednesday, April 24, 2019 at 3:15 PM

To: Aviva Lev-Ari <AvivaLev-Ari@alum.berkeley.edu>

Subject: The latest from IBM Watson