Cleveland Clinic and IBM have entered into a 10-year partnership to establish the Discovery Accelerator — a joint center that utilizes Cleveland Clinic’s research and clinical expertise and IBM’s global leadership in computing technologies. The goal of the partnership is to advance the pace of discovery in healthcare and life sciences by using high-performance computing — including the hybrid cloud, artificial intelligence and quantum computing technologies.

Announced in 2021, the Cleveland Clinic-IBM Discovery Accelerator is a joint center that leverages Cleveland Clinic’s medical expertise with the technology expertise of IBM, including its leadership in quantum computing.

The Discovery Accelerator at Cleveland Clinic draws upon a variety of IBM’s latest advancements in high performance computing, including:

Generative Toolkit for Scientific Discovery and other generative modelling capabilities that leverage AI to infer knowledge gaps and generate hypotheses, and ultimately aim to speed up the research process in therapeutics and biomarkers discovery;

RXN, a cloud-based platform that combines AI models and the ability to directly control robotic labs to enable end-to-end design and synthesis of new chemical compounds;

Deep Search, a next-generation AI tool for generating insight from large amounts of structured and unstructured technical literature; and

High-Performance Hybrid Cloud Computing technologies that enable researchers to “burst” their workloads into the cloud and access the resources they need at scale.  

The Discovery Accelerator also serves as the technology foundation for Cleveland Clinic’s Global Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health, part of the Cleveland Innovation District. The center, supported by a $500 million investment from the State of Ohio, Jobs Ohio and Cleveland Clinic, brings together a team focused on studying, preparing and protecting against emerging pathogens and virus-related diseases. Through Discovery Accelerator, researchers are leveraging advanced computational technology to expedite critical research into treatments and vaccines.

Together, the teams have already begun several collaborative projects that benefit from the new computational power. The Discovery Accelerator projects include a research study developing a quantum computing method to screen and optimize drugs targeted to specific proteins; improving a prediction model for cardiovascular risk following non-cardiac surgery; and using artificial intelligence to search genome sequencing findings and large drug-target databases to find effective, existing drugs that could help patients with Alzheimer’s and other diseases.

A significant part of the collaboration is a focus on educating the workforce of the future and creating jobs to grow the economy. An innovative educational curriculum has been designed for participants from high school to professional level, offering training and certification programs in data science, machine learning and quantum computing to build the skilled workforce needed for cutting-edge computational research of the future.