Lundbeck, IBM Watson Health partner for neurological and psychiatric drug discovery

On Jan 26, 2017

H. Lundbeck is partnering with IBM’s Watson Health to sped up the development of new medicines for the treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders.

The collaboration will combine Lundbeck’s expertise in the treatment of psychiatric and neurological disorders with IBM’s cognitive and knowledge-based analytics to foster the discovery and development of new innovative treatments of disorders such as schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease.

Anders Gersel Pedersen, Executive Vice President, Research & Development at Lundbeck, said: “We strive to develop treatments that affect the underlying biological mechanisms of psychiatric and neurological disorders rather than treating only symptoms.

“By combining our expertise in brain research with IBM’s cognitive computer technology, we expect to improve our foundation for this work, so we can develop new and improved treatments for the 425 million people who suffer from the psychiatric and neurological disorders which Lundbeck focuses on.

Better understanding of diseases

This collaboration will help Lundbeck establish an innovative approach and new platform for real world evidence and advanced analytics where Lundbeck can take advantage of Watson technology across clinical data from millions of anonymized patient lives made available through the Watson Health Cloud.

In addition, this platform will allow Lundbeck to use the Watson technologies across additional Lundbeck data (clinical or other) as well as claims data that will be provided through this collaboration and made available in the Watson Health Cloud.

Finally, Lundbeck will leverage IBM Watson for drug discovery to take advantage of a knowledge-driven approach and in support of the identification of potential new drug targets and alternative drug indications to accelerate discovery and advance the development of therapies.

Anders Gersel Pedersen said: “IBM can help create data-driven hypotheses based on Lundbeck’s questions, which can then be used in further research on fighting psychiatric and neurological disorders. Firstly, we will launch projects within schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease, which we hope will help us better understand these diseases and possible treatments.”