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<a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/Heres-why-bosses-should-coach-millennials-instead-of-managing-them-according-to-an-IBM-task-force/articleshow/52068811.cms">IBM</a> honoured <a href="http://www.businessinsider.in/A-4000-person-IBM-team-dedicated-to-decoding-millennials-found-young-workers-need-3-things-from-their-bosses/articleshow/52047324.cms">11 new fellows for outstanding work across different campaigns</a> including Cognitive, Cloud, Security and Healthcare and amongst them four Indians featured in it. One such fellow is <keyword id="280994" type="PERSON" weightage="100" keywordseo="Ajay-Royyuru">Ajay Royyuru</keyword>. He is using <keyword id="6411673" type="PERSON" weightage="100" keywordseo="Watson">Watson</keyword> for <keyword id="6355291" type="ORGANIZATION" weightage="100" keywordseo="Cancer">cancer</keyword> treatment options. He is creating a database of medical literature which will enable clinicians a faster way to sift through billions of records and find a match for a treatment. 
 
The scientific and clinical literature in oncology is growing very rapidly, as well as the large number of drug treatments and clinical trials that need to be considered, while the context defined by the genomic variations is also an extremely large space. 
 
Ajay Royyuru discusses this and his India specific plans in a chat with Business Insider. 
 
How are you using Watson for Genomics to translate genomic variations in cancer to treatment options? 
Cancer is a disease of the genome, in the sense that the genome of a cell accumulates genomic variations that alter the cell's replication machinery, resulting in rapid or uncontrolled replication. So, by identifying the specific genomic mutations that are driving the growth of cancer, clinicians can potentially tailor the treatment to the patient with much more precision. This approach to precision medicine is increasingly the practice in advanced cancer treatments - but it is very time consuming and it is not widely available. Clinical oncologists and molecular tumour boards are increasingly seeking assistance in identifying the mutations in the genome and analyzing the medical literature for treatment options. 
 
Watson for Genomics performs the task of contextualizing the vast body of knowledge and data in cancer treatment options to the specific genomic variations seen in individual patient's tumor. 
 
Watson for Genomics is currently being used at 16 leading cancer centres including Washington University in St. Louis, University of Washington, University of Southern California, Yale, Duke and the New York Genome Center, to name a few. Clinicians and researchers at these institutions are using Watson to help them identify and personalize treatment options for their patients in a matter of minutes. 
 
2. What are the challenges you are facing? 
With the pace of scientific progress, there continues to be rapid advances in how cancer is studied, diagnosed, characterized, and treated. Which means we have to continue to enhance and train the solution. Another aspect we are working on currently is to scale the use, gather outcomes, and generate improvements based on that data driven learning. 
 
3. Why did you choose this topic? 
There is a couple of compelling industry trends that makes this topic feasible and timely. The steadily declining cost of DNA sequencing is now beginning to make genomic medicine more practical and affordable for broad clinical use. Yet the data challenges still make it difficult to scale up access to precision medicine approaches to treatment. That's where the advances in cognitive computing technologies shine. Personally, it is very motivating to work on scalable healthcare solutions that can help improve clinical care and patient outcome. 
 
4. Any India specific work you are doing currently? <keyword id="10875" type="CITY" weightage="100" keywordseo="IBM">IBM</keyword> is working with Manipal Hospitals to implement Watson for Oncology, which is a cognitive system trained by experts at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to help clinicians sift through massive volumes of medical literature and clinical data to identify evidence-based treatment options for their patients. I look forward to opportunities to extend Watson for Genomics with hospitals and cancer centres in India. 
 
(Image credits: youtube/HHMI)

This is how IBM Fellow Ajay Royyuru is solving one of the biggest challenges of cancer treatment

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">Wikimedia CommonsNeurons</div></div></div>Pfizer and IBM are coming together to put some new data into improving the lives of people with Parkinson's disease, a neurodegenerative disorder that affects roughly <a href="http://nihseniorhealth.gov/parkinsonsdisease/whatisparkinsonsdisease/01.html">half a million people in the US</a>. The tech and pharma giants are partnering to develop technologies that people with Parkinson's can integrate into their daily routines with the hope that the data can help inform future treatments.Parkinson's is characterized by motor symptoms such as shaking in the hands and legs, as well as stiffness and impaired balance, and one of the biggest problems for people who have it is keeping track of the cycles their symptoms follow. For example, tremors may be controlled better using medication at one time of day than another, something called <a href="http://www.pdf.org/en/fall03_periods">"on" and "off" periods</a>. Tracking that information could be critical to developing new medications to treat Parkinson's that aim to reduce the frequency of those "off" periods. Ajay Royyuru, the director of healthcare and life sciences at IBM Research, told Business Insider that the plan is to introduce non-invasive ways to monitor the disease that don't disrupt peoples' daily lives, a group of tools they call "passive.""Our goal is to achieve as much passive deployment as possible," said Royyuru. "The ideal scenario would be, an individual doesn't have to mess with any of the technology...and they just go about living their life. They don't have to push any buttons, they don't have to learn a new interface of any kind."The tech could be embedded into a patient's kitchen, for example, so researchers could see how often that person cooks for themselves - a potential window into how his or her motor skills are holding up. Or it could be a wearable that tracks the patient's sleeps or movement. Having that information could determine how well a certain trial medication is working. Peter Bergethon, Pfizer's head of quantitative medicine, said the decision to start this pharma-tech initiative in Parkinson's was for practical reasons: Pfizer has a drug for Parkinson's in development that could benefit from this kind of "internet of things" monitoring, and by putting it into an actual clinical trial, the idea is to demonstrate just how valuable this information could be.By the end of year, IBM and Pfizer are hoping to figure out the best kinds of sensors to use, and then by 2019 Bergethon said the hope is to get the technology embedded into a Phase 3 clinical trial for one of Pfizer's Parkinson's medications.Bergethon said this integration of tech in Parkinson's research is just the first of many, not only in neurological diseases, but potentially everything from heart conditions to cancer."What we're really trying to do is build a model that we can replicate," Bergethon said. "We're already talking about moving on to other neurological diseases, Alzheimer's is something we'll working on in the near future."

A drug giant is partnering with IBM to get wearables into the study of Parkinson's

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This is how IBM Fellow Ajay Royyuru is solving one of the biggest challenges of cancer treatment

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A drug giant is partnering with IBM to get wearables into the study of Parkinson's

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