In January, President Obama handed the reins to Joe Biden to head a“moonshot” initiative to cure cancer, and a major step toward that end has just been made.
Per Fortune, IBM will donate its Watson supercomputer technology—the same technology that beat humans on Jeopardy!, CNET notes—to Veterans Affairs hospitals and doctors’ offices, offering precision genomic treatment to the largest cancer demographic (3.5% of all US cancer patients) in any one health-care group.
At the National Cancer Moonshot Summit on Wednesday, the VA Department and IBM Watson Health said they hope to use this tech to scale up doctors’ access to such treatment programs and help 10,000 or so veterans over the next two years, per a press release—about 30 times more than the current number in VA facilities using these treatments.