IBM, Public Health Groups Form Global Pandemic Initiative16 May 2006
on open, collaborative innovation. IBM is proud tojoin with our partners in this effort, grounded in our core value of'innovation that matters.'"
Central to the effort will be the use of advanced software technologies,elements of which IBM intends to contribute to the open-source community,that are designed to help share information on disease outbreakselectronically and use it to predict how diseases will spread.
Among the technologies that will be used is a software framework IBMdeveloped to allow electronic health information to be more easily sharedand mined for trends, such as the outbreak of disease. Called theInteroperable Healthcare Information Infrastructure (IHII), the technologyis designed to improve communication and collaboration among medicalprofessionals and researchers by helping them collect and share healthdata. IBM will expand the role of IHII to include public health issues,responding to global calls for pandemic preparedness by facilitating thesharing of clinical data among medical facilities, laboratories and publichealth agencies.
IBM also plans to build a community of users around its epidemiologicalmodeling framework, called Spatio-Temporal Epidemiological Modeller (STEM),which can tap the information collected from IHII, along with additionalinformation such as roadmaps, airport locations, travel patterns, and birdmigration routes around the world. It will allow users to rapidly developmodels for how a disease is likely to geographically spread over time.These models can help public health experts and governmental plannersdevelop more effective preparedness plans.
Ultimately, those plans could include development and distribution of moreeffective and timely vaccines as IBM taps into knowledge gained through aplanned collaborative initiative known as "Project Checkmate," in which IBMand The Scripps Research Institute propose to conduct advanced biologicalresearch on influenza viruses. The collaboration is designed to predictthe way viruses will mutate over time using advanced predictive techniquesrunning on high performance computing systems, such as IBM's BlueGenesupercomputer, allowing effective vaccines to be developed by drug-makers,drawing on the immunology and chemistry expertise at Scripps.
IBM scientists at the company's Research Labs in China, India, Israel,Japan, Switzerland and the U.S. will serve as focal points for thecollaboration. Among the members of the Pandemic Initiative steeringcommittee are: US Agency for International Development, Centers for DiseaseControl and Prevention, World Health Organization, Scripps ResearchInstitute, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center - Center forBiosecurity.
Contact:Michael LoughranIBM Corporation914.945.1613mloughra@us.ibm.com
SOURCE: IBM
Source: marketwire
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