IBM also announced Tuesday that it is working with the CHU Sainte-Justine Research Center Mother and Child University Hospital Center in Quebec to develop an informatics infrastructure. The infrastructure, based on IBM's Clinical Genomics Solution, is geared toward more clearly defining genetic markers for acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL).
Researchers at that hospital will gain real-time access to data that was once extracted from patient files. The information will be electronically transmitted and merged with genomic data to create a Medical Information Repository. That will make queries faster and easier, while allowing doctors to personalize treatment.
At St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, doctors and researchers can perform more than 600 billion operations per second through IBM's supercomputing system. IBM said that system is also geared toward accelerating medical research for catastrophic diseases, including cancer, in children.