When scientists embarked on the 13-year journey to map the human genome in 1990, they envisioned a future where the knowledge of DNA would aid in the diagnosis, treatment and even prevention of thousands of diseases and disorders.
Fast forward to 2012 and that dream is closer to reality thanks to ongoing advances at the nexus of high-performance computing and genomics research. Though we have yet to identify cures for diseases such as cancer and AIDS, personalised treatments based on a patient’s molecular makeup — as opposed to a “one size fits all” approach — are optimising and extending lives.
An essential element to moving forward in the field of personalised medicine is cloud computing technology. The cloud is a future-ready infrastructure that makes it possible to create a healthcare “system” for applied medical research. This system — in which information is secure but accessible to those who need it for analysing, selecting, and administering treatments — streamlines administration, enhances the quality of care and ultimately supports personalised medicine.
Targeting paediatric cancer
The world’s first personalised medicine clinical trial for paediatric cancer conducted by the Neuroblastoma and Medullobastoma Translational Research Consortium and supported by The Translational Genomics Research Institute is using a secure cloud-based IT infrastructure supplied by Dell. In addition to increasing TGen’s gene sequencing and analysis capacity by more than 1,200%, the cloud is also improving collaboration among the researchers and medical professionals working on the trial by allowing them all to access the same massive amounts of information, analysis and results regardless of where they are physically located.
Accelerating treatments for paediatric cancer with cloud technology
The cloud infrastructure — both a high-performance computing resource and a data exchange/collaboration resource — is being used to investigate new technologies that accelerate genetic analysis and identification of targeted treatments for individual neuroblastoma patients. A process that at one time took months to complete (and often required overnight shipment of hard drives from one clinical site to another) has been reduced to just days — meaning that patients can begin receiving effective, personalised treatments that much sooner.
We’re bridging the gap between science, medicine and technology to provide a real-time knowledge repository of the latest findings on the most effective treatments for paediatric oncologists to use globally. Imagine the possibilities. Such cloud computing platforms could support complex biomedical knowledge exchanges between healthcare providers, research centres, clinical genomics and molecular diagnostic vendors and pharmaceutical researchers interested in participating in personalised medicine trials targeting many other diseases and disorders.
Cloud considerations for healthcare
Every healthcare organisation will have its own unique path to cloud adoption, but more and more providers are beginning to see the advantages of moving to the cloud as they work to cut costs, enhance quality, comply with ever-changing regulatory demands and extend their existing IT capabilities. Payers and life sciences companies are seeing the benefits too as they streamline processes to more efficiently manage data and drive innovation.
Privacy and security are of paramount concern in healthcare. Unlike a public cloud, a healthcare cloud must have several key features, including administrative, physical and technical controls to meet the rigorous needs for security, privacy, reliability and compliance of healthcare enterprises.
A secure healthcare cloud should be limited to healthcare tenants only and should:
be configured to support HIPAA compliance;
be hardened and highly available for guaranteed service levels;
include logically partitioned networks, compute and storage layers;
provide data management features, including policy driven data access and deletion;
provide interoperability to ease integration; and
provide mobility for users through secured mobile devices.
The future of healthcare
In the not-so-distant future, IT will be leveraged not only for documentation and exchange, but also for expert diagnosis and analytics. Because of the amount of data that will be generated, stored and analysed, the cloud can speed computational processes, manage and store the resulting data, and provide a forum for analytics and global collaboration.
Once we tap the digital data generated by electronic medical records, imaging and genomics research for intelligence, the possibilities for innovation and health advancement are unlimited.
| IBM Addresses Security Challenges of Big Data, Mobile and Cloud Computing IT News Online ARMONK, N.Y., Oct. 18, 2012 /PRNewswire/ -- In a move designed to reduce the biggest security inhibitors that organizations face in implementing cloud, mobile and big data initiatives, IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a broad set of security software to ... See all stories on this topic » | ||
| Oracle launches partner-driven initiative to boost cloud adoption among mid ... InformationWeek India “In their journey to cloud computing, many midsized companies are moving from silos to a virtual environment. However, the traditional method of building a virtualized infrastructure is very time-consuming and a perplexing effort, owing to the required ... See all stories on this topic » | ||
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| Colo5 Partners with Appcore® to Launch Colo5 Cloud in Hardened Data Center Sacramento Bee based Colo5 Disaster Recovery Center has selected the Appcore Onsite™ system to power their new cloud computing product, making simple and flexible private, public and hybrid cloud services available to businesses of any size in Colo5's highly secure, ... See all stories on this topic » | ||
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| Cloud technology use to rise: Deloitte InvestorDaily.com The firm's recent global financial services industry security survey found that whilst financial sectors in Australia and Asia Pacific (APAC) lag those in the US, UK and Canada in terms of uptake ofcloud computing, 50 per cent of participants reported ... See all stories on this topic » | ||
| Cloud Computing Is Redefining Micro-Learning In Five Revolutionary Ways CloudTweaks News Those are some of the leaps that cloud computing through micro-learning has introduced into the sector. The above is just a drop in the ocean of what is to come in the better years of this tender century. There are education apps to explore as there is ... See all stories on this topic » | ||
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| Pavlov And Cloud Computing: How We Will Overcome Our Anxiety CloudTweaks News In fact every time we participate in online banking we are engaging in a form of cloud computingboth literally in a technological sense, and figuratively in that we can never check on our money in the other room. This sounds like a, “cloud” philosophy. See all stories on this topic »  Shekhar Gupta CEO Capt. Shekhar Gupta [ Pilot, DIAM, M.Ae.S.I., MAOPA [USA] ] shekhar@aerosoft.in Blog : http://shekharaerosoft.blogspot.in/ Shekhar is a Professional Pilot with more then 8 years experience of Flying on 14 different types of Air crafts in 10 different countries with accident free flying record. Shekhar is good in Flying Training as well as in Ground class for Pilots. Shekhar started his flying career from Skycabs [Colombo ] and worked for many Airlines Training Companies from different part of the world. He trained more then 350 Pilots who are flying world wide. He is a member of Aircraft Owners & Pilots Association [ USA], Royal Society of Aeronautics [ UK], Delhi Flying Club, Aeronautical Society of India, MP Flying Club Indore, Aeronautical Research Society. He is a frequent flyer on AA, Air India, British Airways, Cathey Pacific, Delta Airlines, Emerites, Ethihad, Jet Airways, Kingfisher and many more. Shekhar is an active member of www.MissionToCanada.com set up by Govt. of Canada and Air Transport Association of Canada. His recent passion is Aviation SEO for which he takes classes for IIT & IIM students in India and others in abroad. And www.AirAviator.com a new proposed virtual Air Charter Services. |
