Precision Medicine: Who Will Live Forever? – InfoWorld

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Will medical advances using Big Data finally yield a Fountain of Youth unlike anything found in the legendary quests of Ponce de Len? Will someone eventually be able to live forever?

For me, the term Precision Medicine evokes the image of the tricorder,which rapidly and accurately diagnosed many ailments on Star Trek.

The National Institutes of Health (NIH) describes Precision Medicine as an emerging approach for disease treatment and prevention that takes into account individual variability in genes, environment, and lifestyle for each person.

Matching blood types for transfusions and organ transplants, and other types of matching, are examples of medicine slowly moving away from one size fits all. More recently, researchers have been demonstrating that technology coupled with Big Datamade up of information such as gene sequencing information, lab tests (e.g., blood work), scan data (e.g., CT and MRI), and treatment outcomescan greatly accelerate the move to more precise medicine. And it seems much more is in store.

The futurist Ray Kurzweil, author of The Singularity is Near, has even predicted that within a dozen years (by 2029), humans will be extending their lives considerably or even indefinitely.

Big Data is at the heart of this revolution. Facebook, Google, and credit card companies (to name just a few) can spot trends in behavior. Imagine if all our medical information were available to researchers to study for trends. Call it the correlation of Big Data to find causes and cures.

As you can imagine, many experts expect big things. However, given how much is at stake and the amazing possibilities, it might surprise you to know that the medical field is not the biggest user of Big Data. Not by a long shot. The amount of Big Data available to researchers in the medical field pales in comparison to the Big Data being gathered by Facebook, Google, and others trying to understand us in order to reach us with advertising.

Big Data will revolutionize medicine, but it faces enormous challenges revolving around very valid privacy concerns. After all, what is more personal than my medical data?

I attended a panel session entitled Precision Medicine at the Supercomputing Conference last November. While the use of Big Data in medicine is already in full swing, I was disappointed to be reminded how much harder it is for doctors and scientists to use Big Data in their work than it is for search engines, credit card companies, and shopping web sites.

The panel really painted an amazing field of endeavor, and got me excited about the use of Big Data techniques in the medical field. There are many great initiatives under way and very smart people working on making advances in medicine with Big Data. Yes, by all means protect privacy, but I want to see as much Big Data used for better medicine in the future as we can muster.

And if we develop the technology to enormously prolong lives or grant immortality what do we do then? Perhaps well need an answer by the end of the next decade!

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Precision Medicine: Who Will Live Forever? - InfoWorld