Lundbeck has become the latest pharma company to partner with IBM Watson Health, with a deal to speed up its development of psychiatric and neurological treatments.

The Danish firm hopes that adding its drug research know-how to IBM's cognitive computing and analytics will help it develop innovative new medicines.

Starting with projects in schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease, Lundbeck and IBM will also work together to identify potential new drug targets and alternative indications.

Anders Gersel Pedersen, R&D executive VP at Lundbeck, said: “We strive to develop treatments that affect the underlying biological mechanisms of psychiatric and neurological disorders rather than treating only symptoms. 

“By combining our expertise in brain research with IBM's cognitive computer technology, we expect to improve our foundation for this work, so we can develop new and improved treatments for the 425 million people who suffer from the psychiatric and neurological disorders which Lundbeck focuses on.”

Moving beyond drug development and into market access and regulatory considerations, the collaboration will also see Lundbeck set up a new real world evidence and advanced analytics platform.

The platform will provide Lundbeck with access both Watson technology and clinical data in the form of millions of anonymised patient records via the Watson health Cloud.

The deal also allows for the pharma company to use Watson technologies across other Lundbeck data - whether clinical or not - and health insurance claims data.

“IBM can help create data-driven hypotheses based on Lundbeck's questions, which can then be used in further research on fighting psychiatric and neurological disorders,” Pedersen added.

After making a billion-dollar investment in Watson's health capabilities, the last year has seen IBM strike deals with the likes of Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Otsuka and Celgene.

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