Intel is setting its sights on making the scenario of precision medicine a widespread reality through an ambitious data sharing project called the Collaborative Cancer Cloud.
WHAT’S PRECISION MEDICINE?
Precision medicine is an innovative medical model that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person. This “customization of healthcare” is one of the “biggest of the big data problems”.
Intel believes that genomics are the “first wave of precision medicine”. With the Collaborative Cancer Cloud, the company is merging next generation Intel technologies and bio-science advancements to make it easier, faster, and cheaper for anyone to understand any disease that has a genetic component by data sharing, including Alzheimer’s, diabetes, Autism and more – with cancer being their first target.
PERSONALIZED TREATMENT PLANS
“Each year millions of people all over the world, including more than 1 million patients in the United States, learn that they have a cancer diagnosis,” Eric Dishman who does healthcare research for Intel said.
“Instead of going through painful chemotherapy that can kill healthy cells along with cancerous cells, what would happen if those patients were able to be treated as individuals based on their specific genome sequencing, and a precision treatment plan could be tailored specifically for their disease? And what if it could happen within 24 hours?”
Dishman began a fight with kidney cancer aged 19. It took doctors 23 years of “Russian roulette chemotherapy” before he could be administered a personalized treatment that placed the disease into remission. Genome sequencing takes days – sometimes months – and that much time must not be with every cancer patient. Intel and the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) aim at cutting the time to find answers from weeks and months to possibly days or hours.
SECURELY DATA SHARING GENOMIC DATA
The Collaborative Cancer Cloud, allows institutions to securely share patient genomic, imaging and clinical data for potentially lifesaving discoveries, the company explained.
Additional institutions will be on board by 2016. And many more will join the initiative in the future.
“[Researchers] are hesitant to share data for security concerns,” OHSU Knight Cancer Institute Director Dr. Brian Druker said at an Intel conference, Fortune reported.
The project will enable large bunches of data from all five continents to be analyzed and circulated; all this without compromising the privacy and security of individuals. The end goal is to provide targeted treatment plans to patients. By 2020, Intel envisions this happening in 24 hours – “All in One Day”.
What do you think of Intel and OHSU’s Collaborative Cancer Cloud and of the rise of precision medicine? Share your views in the comments section below.
IN GOOD HEALTH? PROVE IT WITH THE ORIGINAL PENNY SKATEBOARD!
Intel: Will "Data Sharing" Take Precision Medicine to the Next Level?
No comments:
Post a Comment