Medical Researchers

can speed discovery of genes that cause diseases.

Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), has no effective treatment and typically kills within five years. Barrow Neurological Institute researchers employed Watson for Drug Discovery to study nearly 1,500 genes in the human genome, and found five that had never before been associated with ALS. Researchers say that such a discovery, which took months with Watson, would have previously taken years and gives them a much clearer idea of what to target for therapy when developing new drugs.