Decreasing the time from discovery
to treatment-- that's one of the major goals of the genomic data
commons.
That genomic data commons is a system
which brings together all of the available data
that cancer researchers can use and processes it, and makes
it easy for them to use it for their own individual research.
So it's a way of accelerating the speed at which cancer
research can be done.
The genomic data commons was publicly
launched at the University of Chicago in 2016.
It uses information from the National Cancer Institute,
and allows analysis and sharing of large amounts of cancer data
in real time.
It's not possible to do this without access
to large amounts of data because it's
the comparison of the individual patient
to large groups of patients that enables us
to personalize the therapies.
Data is vital to scientific discovery.
Large amounts of data are particularly
important with cancer research.
We are in a great time of transition
to go from fairly empiric administration
of traditional chemotherapy to personalized approaches
to each patient.
And in doing so, having precise data, particularly
of genetic data, on what makes up a particular cancer
is very important to us.
Bob Grossman is a computer scientist by training,
working in an area of clinical data analysis.
His expertise is developing a system
that can take huge amounts of data,
and make it accessible and easy to use by researchers
all over the world for free.
Traditionally, pancreatic cancer would be one disease
or maybe distinguished by different histology,
or other types of characteristics.
But by looking at the molecular structure
of the mutations in pancreatic cancer,
we get multiple subtypes.
Each month, more than one petabyte of data
is downloaded from the system.
That's the equivalent of 1,000 terabytes, a huge amount
of information that is stored on University of Chicago
and commercial servers.
So it's massive amounts of work, actually,
to generate the data that go into the system, right?
Once you start to have the data coming through,
then you can mine things in real time,
you can analyze these very complex data sets.
The research done with this information can be very fast.
In some cases, a patient can even
benefit from a clinical trial developed
by the use of their own tumor tissue.
The rapid pace allows a patient to benefit directly
through their own participation.
The key to the commons is to make
huge amounts of high quality data
available to any researcher who wants it.
This should accelerate the discovery of various cancer
treatments.
So if we could double the pace of discovery
in cancer research, we'd be more than happy.
And so that's what we're trying to do.
University of Chicago President Robert Zimmer
says using the genomic data commons
to fight cancer is an example of the large scale societal
issues the university is willing to take on.
Ultimately, you're going to see a huge amount
of work coming out of this, which is not just research, not
just medical care, but entrepreneurial work in terms
of actually thinking about how there are
certain ways of utilizing the market to maximize
the impact of the work.
The Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation
at the University of Chicago is primed
to help maximize that impact.
The Polsky Center works with entrepreneurs
to help develop business strategies that
will get healthful treatments and therapies
to the marketplace quickly.
By virtue of that relationship being in place,
we enhance speed to market, and that
means that those discoveries that will change lives and save
lives make it to the market faster than they ever
would have otherwise.
The value of the data is being seen by many researchers.
Now others want to expand on the expertise of Grossman's team.
Well, I think one of the things we're proudest of is
not only have we built the genomic data commons,
but we've used the lessons learned from that,
and we've produced open source software that we've now used
to build over 10 other commons.
There is now a data commons for brain health,
and one for infectious diseases.
Data for heart, lung, and blood issues
is also being focused on by the University of Chicago team.
Ultimately, this will all lead to more data
for researchers to study in real time,
allowing them to make discoveries more quickly,
and save lives all over the world.
So the university's entire basis from its beginning
and continued through every single person's experience
who has been at the University is this the devotion
to rigorous inquiry around the most important problems
of our time.
Whether the problems are scientific, social, cultural,
every one of them should be approached
through a depth of analysis and absolute rigor and thought.