Even as the incidence rates of many cancer strains continue to rise globally, incidents and death rates in the US are falling and have been steadily falling for more than twenty years. Publishing these findings earlier this year, the National Cancer Institute credits the decrease to educating people on healthy lifestyle choices and “the value of cancer registry data.”
Advanced academic medical research and software development have become major contributing factors to these results.
While some scientists are using software to create simulations of living organisms to study molecular structures, others are reaping the rewards of even more advanced software engineering efforts. Fox News recently reported that technology firms are now able to “extract a person’s entire genetic code from a cell sample."
What used to take more than one hundred computers—and more than six to eight weeks—only a few years ago can now be done in a single day—and for a fraction of the previous cost.
As genome mapping becomes easier, cheaper, and faster, the result will of course be big data—the buzzword of the day. Google, Amazon, and IBM are already on top of it and according to GBI Research have established themselves as “providers of cloud computing to drug makers’ research efforts."
Along with increased job opportunities for developers, engineers, and cloud computing professionals as this technology advances, once this big data is extracted and compiled, many expect a boom for computational biologists to analyze it.
In the video below, Harvard University’s Dr. James E. Bradner puts into perspective just how great the need is these days for developers and academically-minded medical professionals to continue the fight against cancer.
With 40,000 unique genetic mutations affecting more than 10,000 genes, the open source approach to combatting cancer is a fantastic and noble attempt to stay ahead of the curves of the mutations themselves.
