Pfizer and Watson Health Announce Immuno-oncology Collaboration

Pfizer and Watson Health have announced a collaboration to help accelerate Pfizer’s research in immuno-oncology.

Pfizer will deploy Watson for Drug Discovery and customize the cloud-based cognitive tool to support the identification of new drug targets, combination therapies for study, and patient selection strategies in immuno-oncology.

Oncology researchers at Pfizer will use the tool to analyze massive volumes of disparate data sources, including licensed and publicly available dataas well as Pfizer’s proprietary data, a press release stated.

While the average researcher reads between 200 and 300 articles in a given year, the Watson for Drug Discovery tool "has ingested 25 million Medline abstracts, more than 1 million full-text medical journal articles, 4 million patents and is regularly updated," the release adds.