Google Collaborates With US National Cancer Institute to Work on Breast Cancer Research

Google and the US National Cancer Institute are on the road to tackle breast cancer together through Google Cloud's BigQuery.

Through its Google Cloud platform, Google has announced its partnership with the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) to support breast cancer research by providing large cloud-based datasets and powerful tools for analyzing them.

In this new partnership, the NCI will use Google Cloud's BigQuery to securely host and analyze terabytes of genomic and proteomic data, which has helped scientists around the globe immensely.

For those who don't know, data warehouses like BigQuery can help manage and analyze your data with analytics features built-in like machine learning, geospatial analysis, and business intelligence.

As a result of its collaboration with Google, NCI's ISB has not only improved access to data for cancer researchers around the world but has also fundamentally changed how cancer researchers conduct research.

Moreover, the National Cancer Institute hopes to provide data and resources to scientists across the globe thanks to Google, and specifically BigQuery, to potentially lead to breakthroughs in cancer research.

Breastcancer.org estimates that nearly one in eight U.S. women will develop invasive breast cancer during their lifetime. In 2021, about 43,600 women in the U.S. will die from breast cancer which is higher than any other type of cancer.

Now, research conducted at speed and scale can be critical when it comes to potentially life-saving research. Breast cancer in particular, is a major problem. The World Health Organization estimates that there will be more than two million newly diagnosed cases of this disease in 2020 alone.

Thus, any work being done on the issue is extremely important and will ultimately save lives. The use of Google's Cloud resources in the analysis of huge datasets is a great way to utilize technology to save lives.

Google to Provide Global Access to Cancer Data

Dr. Kawther Abdilleh, lead bioinformatics scientist at General Dynamics Information Technology, a partner of the Institute for Systems Biology-Cancer Gateway in the Cloud (ISB) explained, "We are spreading the message of the cost-effectiveness of the cloud."

Abdilleh also noted that Google Cloud's BigQuery has proven that researchers can analyze large data sets inexpensively and more rapidly than ever before, this time it will be put into a much worthy cause by providing global access to cancer data.

Dr. Boris Aguila, a senior ISB researcher, agrees and happily welcomes Google's collaboration with the National Cancer Institute, saying BigQuery performs large-scale statistical analyses of genomic data in the cloud.

According to Aguila, "This analysis is especially useful when it comes to data that is large and heterogeneous, as it does for cancer-related data."

With the success of the data cloud strategy based on Google Cloud, the cancer research community now has access to real-time, secure data in real-time that is crucial to early cancer detection.

This article is owned by Tech Times

Written by Thea Felicity