It has long been the goal for cancer doctors to analyze patients' specific problems and begin a course of targeted treatment the same day.
With big data, scientists believe this could be a reality by 2020 , at least if institutions are able to compute and securely share information successfully (currently not a strength in many healthcare scenarios). It sounds like a difficult goal line, but progress is being made.
Scientists also expect research to advance dramatically around Alzheimer's, diabetes and autism.
Oregon Health & Science University is launching a huge ‘Collaborative Cancer Cloud’, which will share vast amounts of anonymized patient genome data with other organizations, enlarging the pool of data available.
Speeding The Process
Cancer patients regularly wait months to begin treatment, and some then spend years trying different medicines and processes with mixed results.
Using newer technology, the desire is for doctors to analyze a patient within hours, better predict the progress of their disease and kick off a course of targeted treatment only hours later, based on the response of other similar individuals, living in a similar condition, with a very comparable form of the disease.
Each year, over one million people in the US alone find out that they have cancer. Much of their treatment involves an element of educated experimentation, rather than highly tailored responses that are based on extensive evidence of others with the same factors.
The OHSU's Knight Cancer Institute will use a largely open, cloud-based big data platform to analyze huge amounts of genomic, imaging and clinical data, sharing anonymized information with other institutions to create a detailed picture of the myriad different cancer types and progressions.
Two more large cancer bodies are expected to be enrolled by early next year, and it is hoped that dozens of others will be added thereafter.
The OHSU is basing its efforts on a platform developed by Intel, of which key collaborative components are being made open source. The tech firm has been busy creating open source versions of other parts of its healthcare technology, just this week announcing that the speech platform developed for Stephen Hawking is downloadable, for free, by ALS patients and developers.
Less Guesswork, More Precision
The problem with current cancer treatments is that in spite of the vast research behind them they often rely on extensive experimentation . Chemotherapy, a favored treatment in more advanced or fast-developing cases, can kill the cancer in a patient but also wipe out healthy cells.
Serious efforts are now being made in precision medicine, which takes into account very specific details of the disease, alongside a person's genes, environment and lifestyle, and the US is pouring $215 million into its development. The idea is that treatment will be less experimental and more highly targeted to how a patient is likely to respond.
Only around 2% of cancer patients have their genes sequenced, but is thought that thousands could soon be analyzed daily in more advanced hospitals and research centers.
In addition, the understanding of other gene-linked diseases such as Alzheimer's, diabetes and autism, could be vastly improved by being able to compare huge amounts of patient data.
Of course, huge resources are needed for genomic sequencing, but as more data is gained over time from those organizations able to do so, the real results will start coming in. If the data is kept as secure and anonymous as promised, the potential for real answers is enormous - whether or not it's achieved by 2020.