IBM Watson to Tackle Rare Pediatric Diseases Boston Children’s Hospital

IBM Watson to Tackle Rare Pediatric Diseases Boston Children’s Hospital : IBM and Boston Children’s Hospital intend to collaborate to apply IBM’s Watson cognitive platform to help clinicians identify possible options for the diagnosis and treatment of rare pediatric diseases. In an initial project focused on kidney disease, Watson will analyze the massive volumes of scientific literature and clinical databases on the Watson Health Cloud to match genetic mutations to diseases and help uncover insights that could help clinicians identify treatment options. Today about 1 in 10 Americans suffer from a rare disease, and half of these patients are children, according to the Global Genes Project. There are some 7,000 known rare disorders ranging from benign abnormalities to life-threatening disease. Many affected children pass away before a diagnosis can be made, leaving families to grieve without knowing what might have been done to help them, or how to avoid additional brothers or sisters being affected.

At Boston Children’s, investigators at The Manton Center for Orphan Disease Research are focused on diagnosing children with a wide variety of rare genetic conditions. While strides have been made, the interpretation of sequencing results can be a labor-intensive process, presenting an overload of information whose analysis may not always yield a definitive causative variant.

In the new collaboration, Watson will be trained in nephrology by reading related medical literature and aggregating information on causative mutations for steroid-resistant nephrotic syndrome (SRNS), a rare genetic form of kidney disease. Then, experts at Boston Children’s Hospital intend to feed genomic sequencing data from retrospective patients into Watson to further train the system. The goal is to create a cognitive system that can help clinicians interpret a child’s genome sequencing data, compare this with medical literature and quickly identify anomalies that may be responsible for the unexplained symptoms.

“Coping with an undiagnosed illness is a tremendous challenge for many of the children and families we see,” said Christopher Walsh, MD, PhD, director of the Division of Genetics and Genomics at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Watson can help us ensure we’ve left no stone unturned in our search to diagnose and cure these rare diseases so we can uncover all relevant insights from the patient’s clinical history, DNA data, supporting evidence and population health data.”

Even with a diagnosis, effective treatment for rare conditions can be elusive. For example, SRNS are usually unresponsive to immunosuppressive therapy, and often must go on chronic dialysis or wait for a kidney transplant—only to have their disease frequently recur in the new organ.

“One of Watson’s talents is quickly finding hidden insights and connecting patterns in massive volumes of data,” said Deborah DiSanzo, general manager, IBM Watson Health. “Rare disease diagnosis is a fitting application for cognitive technology that can assimilate different types and sources of data to help doctors solve medical mysteries. For the kids and their families suffering without a diagnosis, our goal is to team with the world’s leading experts to create a cognitive tool that will make it easier for doctors to find the needle in the haystack, uncovering all relevant medical advances to support effective care for the child.”

The kidney project will be done in collaboration with Friedhelm Hildebrandt, MD, chief of the Division of Nephrology at Boston Children’s and Claritas Genomics. Following its successful completion, Boston Children’s plans to expand the effort into undiagnosed neurologic disorders and other disease areas studied by The Manton Center, improving diagnostic and treatment services for patients nationwide.