That project, , follows by a few months an that they are jointly developing applications that will essentially turn Watson into an adviser for oncologists at Cedars-Sinai's Samuel Oschin Comprehensive Cancer Institute in Los Angeles.

IBM said last year that healthcare would be the first commercial application for the supercomputer, which defeated two human champions on the popular television game show in early 2011.

At Memorial Sloan-Kettering, Watson will be used as a decision support tool for clinicians to improve their access to current, comprehensive cancer data and practices.

Watson will combine its grid-computing power and its natural language processing ability with MSKCC's clinical knowledge, molecular and genomic data and vast repository of cancer case histories to create an outcome and evidence-based decision support system.

"Memorial Sloan-Kettering's evidence-based clinical approach, scientific acumen, and vast database make it the ideal partner in this ambitious project," Dr. Martin Kohn, chief medical scientist for IBM, said in a statement.