The Cure for Cancer Is Data — Mountains Of Data

By Mark Warren for WIRED.

A few years ago Eric Schadt met a woman who had cancer. It was an aggressive form of colon cancer that had come on quickly and metastasized to her liver. She was a young war widow from Mississippi, the mother of two girls she was raising alone, and she had only the health care that her husband’s death benefits afforded her — an overburdened oncologist at a military hospital, the lowest rung on the health care ladder. The polar opposite of cutting-edge medicine. To walk into such a facility with stage 4 metastatic disease is to walk back in time to the world of the unmapped human genome, when “colon cancer” was understood to have a single cause instead of millions of causes resulting in unique variations, when treatment was the same bag of poison, whether you were in Ocean Springs, Mississippi, or Timbuktu. A time without big data, machine learning, or hope.
Schadt had just started the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai Hospital, and when he heard about the woman in Mississippi, he said, simply, “That’s exactly the kind of patient we take.” By that he meant patients for whom the current standard of care would fail, for whom the future of medicine — one in which supercomputers sift through masses of genetic data for patterns that could lead to new treatments and cures — could not arrive fast enough.
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Source: Science - The Huffington Post - October 19, 2016 Category: Science Source Type: news