Since I am always interested in new technology I thought it
was pretty cool when I saw this
story about Patrick Soon-Shiong who is a billionaire are selling companies he
started. Currently, he is worth $7.3 billion and is chairman for Nanthealth.
What Patrick wants to do is launch a genomic supercomputing
platform that would reduce the time needed to sequence a cancer genome from
currently 8-10 weeks to just 47 seconds. Soon-Shiong just presented some data
that showed that after collecting 6,017 cancer genomes from 3,022 patients
(having over 19 different types of cancer) they were able to be analyzed in 69
hours which is very quick. This was also a lot of data coming in at over 96,000
gigabytes of data. The idea is to provide real-time information to doctors and
patients to help them make better decisions when it comes to health. Nanthealth
who worked with oncologist (cancer doctors) saw incorrect recommendations drop
from 32% to basically 0%.
I have always wondered why supercomputers where modeling
climate change, weather, or the earth’s crust. Putting a supercomputer to use
for things like helping patients is a much better use of taxpayer money if it
can lead to timely information that can be used by patients. As the number of
people on the network grows, doctors will gain more information, meaning they
will be able to help more people. In
2012 it is estimated 1.8 billion people will get cancer and the supercomputer
will be able to analyze about this amount (5,000 patients per day). The cost of the
genome has dropped dramatically and will continue to drop as the quality
increases (one thing I worry about right now is how accurate the genomes are
however this should prove over time).
I discussed in this
post the failure of the war on cancer from the government. This has the
potential to also help sequence other types of diseases that could give doctors
and patients again more data. Trial and error will give quick feedback to what
really works and what doesn’t work. This is how a market system works. I
suspect however privacy groups will be up in arms about sharing any type of
information as they always are. One question I always ask if they are so concerned
about privacy why do they post about their bowel movements on Twitter or
Facebook?
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