6 Ways Big Data Is Driving Personalized Medicine Revolution Posted on : Nov 13 - 2015

Researchers are poised to make huge advances in medicine, particularly in how we treat cancer and arthritis. See how big data and IT are contributing.

The Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program

What if we could study the ongoing health records of more than 1 million people to learn which individuals respond to certain types of drugs, are at risk for a certain disease, maintain health and fitness, age, and die? That's the goal of the $130 million Precision Medicine Initiative Cohort Program (part of a precision health initiative, with an overall $215 million annual budget) being done by the National Institute of Health. The goal is to enroll over 1 million Americans in the cohort in the next three to four years. The data (anonymous, of course) from all 1 million individuals will be furnished to any interested researcher who wants to study one of the largest cohorts ever made available.

All members of the cohort will have their genomes sequenced, and their health history, lifestyle habits, and environmental exposures tracked. By doing so, the study will yield a treasure trove of big data. It will allow people to track the effectiveness of medicine based on genetic markers and identify certain biomarkers that signify that people might be at risk for a given disease.

The cohort could also serve as a platform for smaller trials. For instance, if you needed 100 people with a specific genetic trait who are also taking a certain drug, it could take years to develop a cohort for a study. The Precision Medicine Initiative may be able to identify the people you need in minutes. The NIH also aims to use mobile apps and information from the trial to help the people in the trial lead healthier lives. The agency hopes that by their example they will encourage healthier lifestyles in the general population. IT's advances in mobile devices, cheaper genome sequencing, databases, big data, and electronic health records make knowledge and health goals possible.

National Cancer Institute-Molecular Analysis For Therapy Choice (NCI-Match) Trial

Cancer research program NCI-Match is intended to be a major part of the National Institute of Health's Precision Medicine Initiative. It will enroll about 1,000 people in an effort to match specific types of tumors with specific medicines.

The program will seek out people with tumors that have failed to respond to standard cancer treatments and match those tumors with drugs known to have better outcomes based on certain genetic markers. The hope is to build a database of drugs that have positive effects on different types of tumors in order to get the best treatment to patients the fastest.

The study should be an ongoing ode to personalized medicine and big data, as it will continue to grow new "arms" to study new types of tumors and track new medicines and their effect on certain types of tumors. This has the potential to be the most important cancer trial in history, as it hopefully will unlock the secret to curing multiple rare and fatal types of cancer by matching the individual's genome to the right drug.

This would not have been possible until recently, because genome sequencing would have taken too long. Faster computers, better software, and better databases are at the heart of the success of trials like these.

Wisdom Study

One problem in the treatment of cancer, especially breast cancer, is the false positive. Ten percent of the time, women who get a screening mammogram are called back for further study, but only 5% of the women who get called back actually have cancer. The Wisdom Study is designed to enroll 100,000 women to see if mammograms are really the best way to detect breast cancer. The interesting thing about the study from an IT perspective is that it isn't using an electronic health record provider or a specialized database to manage the study. It is using Salesforce, the cloud-based CRM.

According to the director of the research, Dr. Laura Esserman, Salesforce offers more flexibility, better data management, and the ability to more easily treat patients like people. When something as ubiquitous as Salesforce is being used for clinical trials on a grand scale, you know IT is having a major impact. The cloud, consumerization of IT, and cloud analytics are all responsible. View More