Using Big Data to Beat Cancer

When I had my first class in Management Information Systems back in my sophomore year of college, one of the most fascinating subjects to me was the concept of Big Data. I understood that the world is constantly producing and collecting more and more data, but I had never thought about the real possibilities of harnessing that data. Just like any other kind of science, researching and analyzing the data that computers allow us to collect can, and have, lead to huge breakthroughs.

The idea of using data to fight cancer first came to my attention when I was having a conversation with my boss about her son, who has been doing just that after graduating from [double check college with Mena]. In simple terms, he is working on a huge, and potentially life-changing project, to analyze the movement and growth of brain cancer cells. His team’s hypothesis is that they will be able to map out where the cancer is most likely to move into and understand the exact rate of growth in the cells when exposed to different forms of treatment. This is being done using an incredible amount of data taken from a sample of people with brain cancer, and could potentially change how all other cancers are researched and treated.

Other promising research projects are those across many countries that are attempting to fully map the human genome. In the US, the Department of Veteran’s Affairs’ is launching the Million Veteran Program (MVP) to create one of the largest databases of genetic research,to learn more about how genes affect health. With these massive efforts worldwide, it is estimated that by 2025 there will be data for as many as 2 billion sequenced human genomes. The expansion of these programs has been in response for a huge demand in medical and genetic data - which has changed how disease and treatment is handled from patient to patient.

The biggest challenge that these efforts are facing is that of freely available, consistent data. Medical data becomes a difficult responsibility due to privacy and consent laws, both nationally and internationally. Data sets are not easily shared on a large scale, and even when they are there is no current standard terms in which data is collected or recorded. According to Nancy Brinker and Elad Gil in their article, “Using Data Science to Beat Cancer”, three things need to happen to crack the medical data nut. Patients need to be able to freely share their data easily with a commonized form, there needs to be more funding for the development of data science and cancer, and simply more data sets need to be generated. These sets also need to focus on all ethnicities and relate to all humans.

While Big Data has become a huge promising star on the horizon of medical research, it is also huge and daunting project to tackle, and no one person, group, company, or country can take it on their own. Maggie Wilcoxon.