Data Backup Digest

As healthcare IT continues to blossom, some of the nation’s foremost companies are stepping up to the plate in order to provide their solutions in medical technology and research. One such company, Intel, has recently teamed with the experts at the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University in order to establish a cloud architecture in order to support the latest in cancer research.

While Intel had originally announced their plans for such a project in 2013, their latest cloud platform, known as the Collaborative Cancer Cloud, finally has a launch date of 2016. According to their original announcement, Intel was set to provide the supercomputing technology that OHSU needed in order to perform large-scale and complex studies regarding the genomic profile of cancerous tumors. In their most recent announcement, Intel revealed the fact that they will be using their own software, known as Discovery Peak, in order to facilitate data analytics on behalf of OHSU and the Collaborative Cancer Cloud.

Stephen Pawlowski, chief technology officer with Intel’s Datacenter and Connected Systems Group, explained the benefits of their recent partnership. He was quoted as saying: “This collaboration combines Intel’s strengths in developing energy-efficient, extreme-scale computing solutions with OHSU’s lead in visualizing and understanding complex biological information. We look forward to working together with the goal of improving the efficiency of complex disease diagnosis and personalized treatment.”

The initiative’s main goal is to streamline and hasten the entire process of genomic analysis while simultaneously reducing costs. Set to take place over the course of several years, the long-term project is also meant to introduce personalized genomic analysis into mainstream patient care. Organized and operated by engineers and scientists from both companies: OHSU and Intel, the Collaborative Cancer Cloud, as well as its related studies and mechanisms, is expected to be highly successful.

Apart from the project’s primary objectives, the collaboration is also expected to pave the way for the next generation of IT-related education, including classes in quantitative bioscience, at OHSU. The team currently plans to include the education in both graduate and undergraduate curricula in the near future.

Joe Gray, a Ph.D. holder and an associate director with OHSU, spoke positively about the new collaboration and confidently about the future of cancer and disease research. He was quoted as saying: “By combining Intel’s computing expertise with what we know about how to analyze genomes and to create images of how cells change over time, we believe we have the capability to develop the right tools to make significant progress in making the promise of personalized cancer medicine a reality for more patients. This is likely to be a decades-long process, but along the way we expect that what we will learn in studying cancer will also provide insights into other complex diseases.”

Further Reading

To find out more information about the Knight Cancer Institute at Oregon Health & Science University, including any of their current projects regarding cancer research, please refer to the official OHSU website at www.ohsu.edu.

For more information regarding Intel, including their latest work with the Knight Cancer Institute and Oregon Health & Science University, please visit their official website at www.intel.com.