Care for cancer patients within the NHS will be radically improved through the combined power of such technologies as big data, informatics and Internetof Things-connected devices to sequence the genomes of individual patients.

That's what a collaboration between the University of Oxford and the US-based Chan Soon-Shiong Institute of Molecular Medicine is hoping to achieve, with the two organisations announcing their partnership today at an event in London.

The plan has the full backing of the government, with Minister for Life Sciences George Freeman MP, who was at the event, likening its ambition to that of NASA when it was aiming for the Moon.

"This is a project to sequence the full genome of 100,000 patient volunteers in the NHS and combine it with the hospital clinical data," he said.

"We're creating the world's first at-scale dataset [of the genome], the NASA of biomedicine, which will help to shape the precision medicine landscape in the 21st century. Pulling together the two transformational technologies of genomics and informatics will allow us to practise in our health system a much more targeted, precise model of medicine for the benefit of patients," Freeman added.

When Computing asked about the technology behind the genome project, Dr Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder and chairman of the Chan Soon-Shiong Institute for Molecular Medicine, gave some insights into the computing power that will be harnessed to diagnose and treat cancer.

He explained that examining the genome of just one patient represents half a terabyte of data. Therefore, to collect and analyse data from many thousands of patients will require the resources of a supercomputer.

"If you look at the United States there's 13 million cancer survivors, which translates to 4,000 or 5,000 a day. That's equivalent to 50 to 60 times the download of information from Facebook every day," Dr Soon-Shiong explained.

This is why a phenomenal amount of computing power is required to extract data from the "tiny matter" of the genome.

"The first thing that was needed was an infrastructure of data transfer which had never actually been considered on this planet before. So we had to actually create an infrastructure which could move all that data; this is now active," Dr Soon-Shiong told Computing.

Originally posted here:

Oxford University big data and IoT project to 'create the NASA of biomedicine'