April 22, 2019 - IBM Watson Health is winding down one of its flagship artificial intelligence services, according to a report from STAT News citing internal sources. IBM Watson for Drug Discovery, one of the company’s forays into machine learning-driven precision medicine, is experiencing “lackluster financial performance” and sluggish demand, the publication asserted. The company will no longer market the drug discovery product or continue to develop its capabilities, but existing users will still receive support and the service will remain an option for clients who want to continue to use it. IBM Watson Health will instead turn more of its attentions to clinical trial matching, which has seen more success. “We are focusing our resources within Watson Health to double down on the adjacent field of clinical development where we see an even greater market need for our data and AI capabilities,” a spokesperson told STAT. The modular system for drug discovery allows users to identify specific diseases, genes or pharmaceuticals for targeted research, then uses natural language processing and other machine learning techniques to comb through millions of academic publications, patents, and pharmaceutical literature to highlight important associations or relationships between them. Customers have used the product to identify new genetic markers or targets for specific diseases and uncover insights into how pharmaceuticals function in people with unique genetic makeups, the product’s website says. Results can be visualized using dashboards, IBM Watson says, and published, peer-reviewed medical literature shows that the ability to use AI for this purpose can be powerful and effective. However, customers of IBM Watson’s wider range of products have not necessarily been wowed by the supercomputer’s abilities to put its theoretical knowledge into practice. Despite spending billions on splashy acquisitions of analytics companies and data-rich assets, IBM Watson has struggled to capitalize on its early momentum, even though demand for AI tools appears stronger than ever. IBM recently made waves across the tech industry by laying off a number of employees affiliated with these acquired entities, although the company stressed that the downsizing was part of a normal restructuring process. And in 2017, Watson suffered a high-profile setback when MD Anderson Cancer Center discontinued its oncology-focused pilot, giving detractors fuel to claim that AI is simply not ready for the challenges of the healthcare environment. Engineering publication IEEE Spectrum shows that few of IBM Watson Health’s collaborations with healthcare providers have yet produced tangible results, although some projects are still in progress and IBM notes that not every valuable research initiative ends in a commercialized product. New collaborations have also been announced in recent months, including a $50 million research program with Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Vanderbilt University Medical Center, building off a huge investment in an AI-focused laboratory at MIT. Still, for a company that has pinned a great deal of its reputation on artificial intelligence for healthcare, the rollback of its drug discovery service is not encouraging. Precision medicine is widely viewed as one of the most promising arenas for artificial intelligence, and personalizing therapies for individuals with cancers or rare genetic conditions is both clinically valuable and financially lucrative. The inability to impress an industry that seems boundlessly eager to embrace artificial intelligence for complex, high-value workflows is no doubt problematic for Big Blue, but it could also have wider impacts on adoption rates among hospitals and health systems. Uncertainty about the value of AI and its ability to improve daily practice are still commonplace, and truly trustworthy, useful tools have not yet filtered down to the majority of providers. While leading health systems are highly optimistic that AI will indeed improve clinical practice and help match individuals with appropriate therapies in a reliable manner, not everyone is convinced by the hype. The healthcare industry has an incredible amount of work to do before it can incorporate AI into routine clinical decision-making at scale, and these body blows to one of the biggest names in healthcare AI could slow down the process. Industry observers will no doubt be watching IBM Watson closely as it pivots its attentions on more promising opportunities for its suite of products and services. If it can continue to succeed in its chosen areas of focus and recapture the interest of the larger healthcare industry, Watson still has very strong potential to retain its position as a leading force in the development of cutting-edge AI capabilities.
The use of AI in the health care industry has been dealt a blow after IEEE Spectrum said it was reducing its Watson for Drug Discovery product due to a "lacklustre financial performance". According to STAT News, sources said IBM will no longer market or develop the unit, which will remain accessible to existing users, and will instead focus on clinical trial matching. IBM Watson Health recently spotlighted the paucity of results from collaborations between medical firms and IEEE Spectrum, amid continued uncertainty surrounding the clinical benefits of AI.