SHARING DRUG DATA

Abstract

WILLIAM GIBSON, THE SCIence fiction writer, once wrote that the future is already here— it just isn't very evenly distributed yet. This is the kind of idea that information technology (IT) companies readily embrace. Mike Svinte, vice president for marketing and business development at IBM Life Sciences, says he likes Gibson's notion because it suggests a handful of isolated IT trendsetters whose efforts give us a window onto the future of the state of the art. He points to IBM clients, such as the Mayo Clinic and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, that are forging the kind of collaborative research support systems that he says will underpin drug discovery in the era of personalized medicine—the genomicsdriven effort to target medications to specific populations or even individual patients. But if the future of IT for drug and health care organizations is unevenly distributed, the information that needs to be harnessed, vetted, and ...