Big Data Has Potential for Big Impact in Health Care Research, Delivery

Collecting and manipulating enormous amounts of data soon will begin to play a vital role in research and delivery of health care, according to California leaders of the "big data" movement. "You're starting to see a crescendo of big data efforts and that's sharply increasing awareness of what that can mean in health care," said David Haussler, director of the Center for Biomolecular Science and Engineering at UC-Santa Cruz.

Last week, UC-Santa Cruz researchers announced plans to create the world's largest depository for cancer genomes. In conjunction with the National Cancer Institute, the Cancer Genomics Hub is designed to provide researchers with a huge and growing database of biomedical information that can be used in "personalized" or "precision" care, in which treatments target specific genetic changes found in an individual patient's cancer cells.

"Big data collection and computing is allowing us for the first time to get a complete molecular characterization of cancer," Haussler said. "The scale of what we're doing is far beyond anything anybody's been able to put together before. I think you're going to start to see this sort of big data effort on several fronts -- partly because of supercomputing capabilities that we haven't had until recently and also because of wireless devices that are increasingly being used to transmit data," Haussler said...