Way back when I started this blog, I hoped I'd be able to post something at least every other day. I knew it had been a while since I posted something, but didn't realize it had been 2+ months. Here's hoping that I can keep it going from here on out.
On Saturday, I saw a link to an article by Fast Company. This article, Obama's Precision Medicine Initiative is the Ultimate Big-Data Project, spoke to me for several reasons. Bit data is a hot topic right now. The CS Department at VT is home to the Discovery Analytics Center (DAC). Dr. Naren Ramakrishnan, director of DAC, has been working with "big data" for years. When he spoke to prospective students years ago, he used store loyalty cards to illustrate how data can be used to market items to card holders. He always got a laugh when he mentioned the correlations that were found between certain items purchased, like diapers and beer. That's great for marketing, but in all seriousness, there are ways that crunching big data can make huge changes in the world.
When I spoke with prospective students, I mentioned the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (VBI), now known as the Biocomplexity Institute. It's not been that long ago that we said that "bioinformatics" was such a new field that we got a spelling error when we added it to slide presentation. Bioinformatics combines many different fields of study, but to make it real, I would explain that in the future, VBI might be able to create medicine for an individual's DNA. I admitted it sounded kind of "big brotherish," but that it would eventually happen. One of the things that this article shows is how far bioinformatics has come.
Reading about Cancer Moonshot and how big data could help, and is already helping, in curing cancer made a huge impression on me. After losing my dad and a best friend to cancer, and learning of several friends fighting their own battles with The Big C, this can't happen fast enough. The sharing of information could provide many new insights, but synthesizing the data already available may bring better and more efficient treatments for cancer and many other diseases and illnesses.
