WASHINGTON, June 29, 2016 /PRNewswire/ -- At Vice President Biden's National Cancer Moonshot Summit today, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and IBM Watson Health (NYSE: IBM) announced a public-private partnership to help doctors expand and scale access to precision medicine over the next two years for 10,000 American veterans with cancer. IBM's Watson for Genomics technology is expected to help in the department's precision oncology program by providing information to help physicians identify precision treatment options for almost 30 times more patients than could be previously served. “You’re limited by the number of patients that you can look at in any given week, which means that you limit the number of individuals that you can sequence.” 
 
 If Watson for Genomics can help the VA expand its precision medicine program to 10,000 cases over two years, it should be quite meaningful for the Cancer Moonshot efforts. Oncologists will feed Watson a sequence of DNA along with a list of the changes that are thought to cause the cancer, known as deidentified genetic alteration files. Watson will generate a report for physicians that identifies the likely cancer-causing mutations and possible treatment options to target those specific mutations through a comprehensive review of existing medical literature – a data-intensive process that has been time-consuming and difficult to scale in the past. “Genetic alterations are responsible for most cancers, but it remains challenging for most clinicians to deliver on the promise of precision medicine due to the sheer volume of data surrounding each decision that needs to be made,” said David J. Shulkin, Under Secretary for Health at the Department of Veterans Affairs in a statement. “By applying Watson to this problem, we see an opportunity to scale access to precision medicine for America’s veterans, a group most deserving of the best care in the world.” 
 
 The public-private partnership is due to be officially announced Wednesday at the National Cancer Moonshot Summit, a gathering of scientists, oncologists, donors, and patients in Washington, D.C. Veterans of war experience disproportionately high rates of cancer diagnosis and mortality and as America's largest integrated health system, VA serves 3.5 percent of the nation's cancer patients – the largest group of cancer patients in the country. As a tool to help doctors evaluate treatment options for their patients, Watson for Genomics produces a list of potential therapies ranked by levels of evidence with links to associated research and clinical trials for physicians to consider. The VA's top priorities of access to and quality of care could be enhanced through this innovative technology. IBM researchers have developed cognitive computing technologies that enable researchers and clinicians to draw insights from vast, disparate data sources, including structured and unstructured data. Learn more about this story on the IBM THINK Blog: http://asmarterplanet.com/blogs/think/2016/06/29/va-enlists-watson/ 
 
 About the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs 
 
 The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is the second largest federal Department providing care to the nation's 22 million Veterans. The addition of Watson's brain power, which can understand questions in natural language and not just the computer language of ones and zeros, could significantly accelerate cancer treatment.
– In January, President Obama handed the reins to Joe Biden to head a "moonshot" initiative to cure cancer, and a major step toward that end has just been made. Per Fortune, IBM will donate its Watson supercomputer technology—the same technology that beat humans on Jeopardy!, CNET notes—to Veterans Affairs hospitals and doctors' offices, offering precision genomic treatment to the largest cancer demographic (3.5% of all US cancer patients) in any one health-care group. At the National Cancer Moonshot Summit on Wednesday, the VA Department and IBM Watson Health said they hope to use this tech to scale up doctors' access to such treatment programs and help 10,000 or so veterans over the next two years, per a press release—about 30 times more than the current number in VA facilities using these treatments. "By applying Watson … we see an opportunity to scale access to precision medicine for America's veterans, a group most deserving of the best care in the world," the VA's undersecretary for health says. How this "Watson for Genomics" will work: After DNA sequencing on cancer patients, that info will be plugged into Watson, which will analyze and cross-reference existing medical data and then spit out what's probably causing the cancer mutations and what precision treatment is likely the best option—a task that was previously extremely time-consuming due to the volume of data and not very scalable. Plus, physicians in any part of the country—not just those near urban centers with top cancer facilities—will have access. Forbes notes the project won't do much to help patients outside the VA system and that no one knows yet exactly how effective Watson will be at pulling off this ambitious job. But it says while "efforts like the Cancer Moonshot have trouble living up to their own hype … they can grease the wheels of progress a little bit." (Watson released its own cookbook last year.)