When we talk about Big Data, we often talk about it in terms of business, and in particular how it can be used to generate money. But it’s important to remember that the possibilities go way further. Science has the task of expanding humanity’s horizons–whether that’s by exploring space or discovering more about the tiny organisms that make up the natural world. From the start, data has played a role in this. But in the age of Big Data–the field which has emerged thanks to the explosion in the amount of data we create and capture, and the advanced computer analysis that has become possible in recent years–it’s more important than ever.

The fight against cancer is the search for the Holy Grail of medicine. Almost everyone will be affected at some point in their lives, either personally or by proxy through a loved one. So it’s no surprise that Big Data is being put to use in many ways to aid the task of improving care, identifying risks and hopefully eventually producing cures.

One such project is the American Society for Clinical Oncology’s CancerLinQ initiative, which aims to collate data from every cancer patient in the US and make it available for analysis in the hope that it will reveal patterns that lead to new insights.

These could be useful for doctors providing treatment–accessing up-to-date information on how thousands of others have reacted to a proposed treatment plan will enable them to tailor treatments to individual patients and provide the best chance of a positive outcome.

Cancer researcher at Cambridge Cancer Research Centre (Photo by Dan Kitwood/Getty Images/Cancer Research UK)

AI-Driven Diagnosis

It was recently announced that 14 cancer institutes across the United States and Canada would be using ’s Watson analytics engine to match cancer patients with the treatments most likely to help them.

As well as recommending the relevant cancer drug most likely to treat a particular patient’s cancer, Watson can even recommend drugs that have not been used to treat cancer before. Since it is programmed with specific details of how thousands of medicines interact with the human body, Watson can suggest anything which it thinks might interact beneficially with the cell affected by mutation which is causing the cancer. Of course, a doctor will probably have to take many other issues into consideration before prescribing whatever the AI-driven Watson suggests, but it surely will speed up the process.