IBM Teams Up With Pfizer To Move Towards Parkinson's Cure

International Business Machines Corp. IBM and Pfizer Inc. PFE announced on Thursday a collaboration to develop monitoring solutions aimed at transforming how health care providers deliver care to patients suffering from Parkinson's disease.

According to IBM's press release, the collaboration will see the creation of a system of sensors, mobile devices, and machine learning tools that will provide real-time, around-the-clock disease symptom information to researchers and healthcare providers.

IBM added the ultimate goal of its collaboration is to gain a better understanding of a patient's disease progression and medication response to help inform treatment decisions and speeding the development of new therapeutic options.

"We have an opportunity to potentially redefine how we think about patient outcomes and 24/7 monitoring, by combining Pfizer's scientific, medical and regulatory expertise with IBM's ability to integrate and interpret complex data in innovative ways," said Mikael Dolsten, M.D., Ph.D., President of Pfizer Worldwide Research and Development. "The key to our success will be to deliver a reliable, scalable system of measurement and analysis that would help inform our clinical programs across important areas of unmet medical need, potentially accelerating the drug development and regulatory approval processes and helping us to get better therapies to patients, faster."

"With the proliferation of digital health information, one area that remains elusive is the collection of real-time physiological data to support disease management," said Arvind Krishna, Senior Vice President and Director of IBM Research. "We are testing ways to create a system that passively collects data with little to no burden on the patient, and to provide doctors and researchers with objective, real-time insights that we believe could fundamentally change the way patients are monitored and treated."