IBM (IBM) and Teva Pharmaceutical Industries (TEVA) announce a significant expansion of their existing global e-Health alliance with a focus on two key healthcare challenges: the discovery of new treatment options and improving chronic disease management.

Both projects will run on the IBM Watson Health Cloud. The expanded partnership features a new, three-year research collaboration to develop cognitive technologies that can enable a systematic approach to the emerging field of drug repurposing and deliver unprecedented scale in the discovery of new uses for existing drugs.

The companies also announced that respiratory and central nervous system diseases will be the first targets for their chronic disease management initiative, which will be the first project to integrate data from The Weather Company into the analysis. The joint work in chronic disease management emerges from Teva's existing alliance with IBM as a Foundational Life Sciences Partner for the IBM Watson Health Cloud.