The New York Genome Center has now joined this movement. It’s enlisting Watson, a computer developed by IBM that first came to fame in 2011 when it defeated human contestants on the game show “Jeopardy.”

Since its television victory, Watson has turned its attention to medicine. Its reading list include the study abstracts stored in Medline, a federal government index. “I believe at this point it’s up to 23 million or so now,” said Ajay K. Royyuru of IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. “We’re taking all of it.”

For a pilot study, Dr. Darnell and his colleagues will use Watson to help them come up with personalized treatments for a type of brain cancer known as glioblastoma. They chose the disease because forms of it are so devastating.

For the worst types, Dr, Darnell said, “It’s as close to a death sentence as you can get,” with patients typically surviving a year after diagnosis. In those cases, surgery, radiation and chemotherapy sometimes help, but they’re hardly a panacea. “It works for about a third of the patients, and it gives them about two extra months,” said Dr. Bloom.

In the new study, the scientists will initially recruit 20 patients. They will sequence genomes from tumor biopsies and feed that data (along with the sequences of healthy cells from the patients) to Watson.

Watson will identify the mutations in the tumor and draw on its medical knowledge to develop a hypothesis for how they cause cancer. It will then put together a list of drugs that could potentially treat the cancer.

“All of this is being done in seconds to minutes,” said Dr. Royyuru.

Those drugs may directly target the mutant proteins in cancer cells, or they may target other proteins they work with. Some of the drugs may have been studied for other types of cancer before, but not for glioblastomas. Some of the drugs may have never been tried out on any cancer before.