Celgene and IBM Watson Health have announced a collaboration to co-develop IBM Watson for Patient Safety, a new offering that aims to enhance pharmacovigilance methods used to collect, assess, monitor and report adverse drug reactions. The new offering will run on the Watson Health Cloud.

The collaboration will combine Watson’s cognitive computing ability with Celgene’s history and experience in drug safety and risk management in order to create an outcome- and evidence-based drug safety decision support system for life science companies. Watson’s cognitive computing engine continuously learns, so it is expected that Watson for Patient Safety will increasingly be able to help identify potential drug safety signals.

Watson for Patient Safety is being developed as a first-of-its-kind, highly automated drug-safety offering designed to enable the rapid collection, collation and automated analysis of high volumes of data from diverse sources, including anonymized electronic medical records, medical claims databases and other healthcare information sources. Watson for Patient Safety will be designed to drive pharmaceutical companies’ understanding of complex safety questions, and delivery of evidence-based insights to help support ongoing understanding of the safety profiles of drug products by stakeholders.

This advanced approach is intended to help biopharmaceutical companies and other stakeholders to better manage and interpret large volumes of Individual Case Safety Reports (ICSRs) describing potential side effects associated with drug products. Across the biopharmaceutical industry these reports are increasing in volume and complexity as data sources grow and regulations evolve.

“With this collaboration, we intend to create a paradigm shift in identifying patient safety data that we hope can be applied across the entire product lifecycle – from early development through to approved medicines,” said John Freeman, MSc, JD, corporate vice president of Global Drug Safety and Risk Management for Celgene. “The new offering we are co-developing will bring the cognitive computing power of Watson and its growing view of clinical, research and social health data to bear on this critical healthcare challenge.”

“Celgene established one of the first risk management systems, and its commitment to pharmacovigilance continues with this collaboration,” said Lauren O’Donnell, vice president of Life Sciences, IBM Watson Health. “Together we look forward to creating a cognitive solution that can be applied across the industry to help benefit patients everywhere, leveraging our cloud platform.”

Watson for Patient Safety will be developed in phases, with the first module anticipated within the next year. Watson Health Cloud for Life Sciences Compliance offers a health-data enabled infrastructure and is designed to streamline GxP compliance.