International Business Machines Corp (IBM) launched a computer system that can quickly identify patterns in massive amounts of data.

Watson Discovery Advisor, will be available through the cloud. Some researchers and scientists have already been using Watson to sift through the sludge of scientific papers published daily.

Johnson & Johnson is teaching the system to read and understand trial outcomes published in journals to speed up studies of effectiveness of drugs and Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company is working with Watson to identify alternate uses for existing drugs.

>”On average, a scientist might read between one and five research papers on a good day,” said Dr. Olivier Lichtarge, investigator and professor of molecular and human genetics, biochemistry and molecular biology at Baylor College of Medicine.

>He used Watson to automatically analyze 70,000 articles on a particular protein, a process which could have taken him nearly 38 years.

?“Watson has demonstrated the potential to accelerate the rate and the quality of breakthrough discoveries,” he said.

[SOURCE](http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/08/28/us-ibm-watson-science-idUSKBN0GS02820140828)