The Future of Healthcare

Few areas of health and medicine have gone untouched by the technology, research and innovation generated by IBM over the past century.

From the first continuous blood separator which led to treatment for leukemia patients, the first heart lung machine to keep patients alive during surgery, the excimer laser used in LASIK eye surgery, to technologies of the future that will one day allow nano-sized particles to enter the bloodstream and fight drug-resistant infections, IBM touches more points in healthcare than anyone else.

IBM has created hardware and applications specifically designed to improve care, improved diagnostics and treatment of disease, and advanced how medical knowledge is shared. This goes far beyond computers. New areas of Research including breakthroughs in gene sequencing and nanotechnology and even innovations in chip design are improving healthcare around the world.

• In the 1950s, IBM built the first heart-lung machine to be used successfully on a person during surgery.
• IBM and the National Cancer Institute collaborated in the 1960s to invent the first continuous blood cell separator, which was used for harvesting white cells (and, later, platelets) to treat leukemia patients.
• Working with the World Health Organization, IBM precisely mapped outbreaks of smallpox in 1976, enabling WHO to allocate its limited personnel and resources to the most urgent locations. The system later became a global model for demographic tracking.
• IBM invented the method for using excimer lasers that eventually became photorefractive (LASIK) eye surgery.
• In the early 1990s IBM and the University of Washington built a prototype of the first medical imaging system.
• IBM's World Community Grid, released in 2004, uses pervasive networking and crowdsourcing to apply supercomputer levels of processing power to urgent healthcare and societal needs such as fighting AIDs, cancer and dengue fever and malaria.
• Using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputing simulations, researchers at IBM and the University of Edinburgh are currently collaborating on lab experiments to design drugs aimed at preventing the spread of the HIV virus. Until recently, doctors had to make an educated guess about what mix of drugs would work for patients. By simulating the effect of drug cocktails virtually, IBM is helping patients and breaking new barriers in personalized medicine.
• IBM is currently working with Roche on a DNA Transistor, a high-tech and low-cost way of reading the human genome sequence. This technology may soon be used to create better patient profiles, tailor-made diagnoses and treatments informed by genetics-driving down the cost of healthcare while drastically improving quality of care and quality of life.

Using principles and technologies from computing, physics, material sciences and chemistry, IBM Research has a track record of successfully transferring technology to create new solutions for healthcare. The company spends more than $6B a year on R&D, much of it on healthcare, and IBM is one of the few technology companies with large teams of physicians and other clinicians on staff to ensure we are addressing healthcare's most pressing needs.

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED BY EHEALTH NEWS: THURSDAY, 16 JUNE 2011