This year commercial products based on Watson were unveiled for clinical use, harnessing the system's ability to crunch through swaths of medical information and make decisions.
In January, four research teams reported harnessing the system, called CRISPR, to target the destruction of specific genes in human cells.
To harness the CRISPR/Cas system for genome editing in Streptomyces species, the pCRISPomyces expression system was designed.
"If scientists harness the firefly system, you could produce a lot less heat to make light".
Efforts to harness the immune system to fight cancer have suffered setback after setback.
His claims of success were disputed and most attempts since then to harness the immune system have not worked.
Treatments that harness the immune system have shown great promise against some forms of cancer, such as melanoma, but they do not work in everyone.
Early attempts to harness the immune system to fight cancer involved tumour-associated antigens, proteins that are present on the outer surface of tumour cells.
Approval would also represent the first success after numerous setbacks in efforts to develop what are sometimes called cancer vaccines, not because they prevent cancer but because they harness the immune system to fight the disease after it develops.
Executives of both companies said that the two would fit together well, since both were working on drugs that harness the immune system -- Aviron with vaccines and MedImmune with monoclonal antibodies and vaccines.
