Hoping to customize medical treatments to individual patients, Mayo Clinic and IBM are applying pattern recognition and data mining to the electronic records of about 4.4 million Mayo patients.

The goal is to find patterns–based on age, medical history, genetics, and other factors–related to how patients respond to various treatments and adapt care accordingly. The researchers will also search patient data for relationships among particular proteins, genetic makeup, and responses to specific treatments, which could lead to new discoveries and treatments for certain classes of patients.

Mayo Clinic will also be the first medical institution to use IBM’s Blue Gene supercomputer for molecular modeling in disease research.