Cancer continues to be a thorn in the flesh of many countries with some countries reporting Rising incidents per year necessitating more aggressive means to combat the disease which comes in many shades and forms.
Clinical trials play a big role in the treatment and curative care of cancer but with the different types of cancer and the many patients it can be quite difficult for patients to get recruited for the trials that will best work for them.
Enter the power of analytics which is revolutionizing the world of clinical trials and towards this end, The Mayo clinic started sing IBM’s Watson to quickly and accurately match patients with appropriate clinical trials.
The partnership was started in September last year and Watson uses natural language processing and powerful data analytics capabilities to help Mayo clinicians quickly sift through millions of pages of clinical trial and patient data and complete this cumbersome process in seconds.
At any given time, the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota is conducting over 8,000 human studies in addition to the 170,000 that are ongoing worldwide. However, many clinical trials are not completed due to lack of sufficient enrollment.
While speaking at the recently held IBM Interconnect conference in Las Vegas USA, Steven Alberts a professor of oncology in the College of Medicine, Mayo Clinic, and a consultant in the Division of Medical Oncology  
said that as clinical trials become more complex, getting a trial that is fit for a patient can be difficult but with the power of analytics the information brought up is correct and to the specific trials and which in turn helps to know the eligible patients fort he trials thus heping to save time and cost .
“With the automate system, therapy becomes beneficial to the patient, there is advance cure for patients and reduction of cost of health care, “ said Alberts.