Big Data in Healthcare – Saving Lives with Personalized Medicine

In this video, Intel Fellow Eric Dishman shares a personal story of how his 25 year struggle with kidney cancer was finally resolved through Big Data and personalized medicine. Dishman’s doctors were able to treat him successfully after sequencing his complete genome.

For personalized medicine, only 50,000 people on earth have had their entire genome sequenced. As Dishman describes, this used to take months of supercomputing time and was simply out of reach for most people. This is starting to change thanks in part to advances in computing powered by Moore’s Law.

The National Human Genome Research Institute, (NHGRI) has tracked the costs associated with DNA sequencing performed at the sequencing centers funded by the Institute. This information has served as an important benchmark for assessing improvements in DNA sequencing technologies and for establishing the DNA sequencing capacity of the NHGRI Genome Sequencing Program (GSP). Here, NHGRI provides an analysis of these data, which gives one view of the remarkable improvements in DNA sequencing technologies and data-production pipelines in recent years.

As these trends continue, I’m hoping we can share many stories from people like Eric Dishman. And the next time someone tells me that Big Data is just hype, I’m hoping that the conversation goes the way of Big Discovery.