In the war against cancer and in a world of continuously developing technology, expertise in genomics and biomedical imaging tied up with large-scale computing make a powerful weapon in fighting against a disease that kills millions of people all over the world.
It's faster, cheaper and personalized for patients.
At the Intel Development Forum on Aug. 17, Intel announced its collaboration with Oregon Health and Sciences University's Knight Cancer Institute through an open Platform-as-a-Service solution to managing cancer called Collaborative Cancer Cloud.
This pilot network, a platform of precision medicine analytics, will allow the secure sharing of genomic data in patients that will tailor cancer research and create personalized medicine. With the Collaborative Cancer Cloud, answers can be found quicker in possibly just days or even hours from the current time it takes, which could go from a week to months.
"It will enable large amounts of data from sites all around the world to be analyzed in a distributed way, while preserving the privacy and security of that patient data at each site," says Intel Health Strategy and Solutions General Manager Eric Dishman.
The Collaborative Cancer Cloud will aid doctors help patients by using their genome to provide diagnosis and come up with a targeted treatment plan. This multi-year collaboration envisions that by 2020 the process of diagnosis and treatment planning will then take only one day.
The collaboration also highlights the rise of precision medicine which considers the many individual differences found in people's genes, their environment and lifestyles. Intel and OHSU are combining next-generation technologies and bio-science advancements to make it easier, faster and more affordable for clinicians, researchers and developers to understand and find a cure to any disease having a genetic component. To Intel, genomics is the first wave of this remarkable transformation of precision medicine. The Collaborative Cancer Cloud aims to drive the adoption of genomic sequences, appliances and cloud-based analytics that give rise to precision medicine.
"If you trace the origins of personalized care, my view is that it actually comes back to the drug that we developed here, which was Gleevec. And what we defined was that if you understood what drives the growth of the cancer, you could attack that specifically, and best a promise to personalized medicine, taking each individual patient, attacking the cancer at its roots and getting high response rates with good durability in minimal toxicity," said OHSU's Director of the Knight Cancer Institute Dr. Brian Druker, MD.
Druker also emphasized the enormous amount of data that is needed in personalized cancer care. Currently, they have already sequenced more or less a couple of thousands of cancer genomes that will soon have to be taken up to a couple of millions of data, which is actually mind-boggling. "We really need enormous compute power to really discern what is going on in cancer."
