Personalized Medicine – Not Quite Almost Ready

The revolution hasn’t quite arrived – yet.

But, “” (PM – to my mind – the tight linkage of to therapeutic strategies) is an inevitable outcome of the current state-of-the-art knowledge of , , combined with recent advances in computational, database, & ; & that the practice of personalized medicine, at least at the institutional level, will soon be a requirement – not an option – for many types of treatment. The corollary of this is that institutions who implement these capabilities soon & well, will thrive – those that do not, will be seen as second-tier care centers. There are already numerous examples of PM that are being practiced today such as those defined by companies like Genomic Health who provide unique for ER+ or stage II+ . Most large pharmas & even giants such as Medco are moving toward making PM pay.

What does, “tight linkage of diagnostic results to therapeutic strategies” really entail? I think that there are two key elements – technology & process. The technology piece primarily involves linking together multiple, , providing the computational horsepower to rationally data mine the combined resources, & to provide the properly authenticated & authorized physicians, nurses, & researchers with timely access to the results.

None of the technology is particularly novel, but hooking up all of the pieces correctly is – & I can imagine that some parts of that process will be a bit painful.

I believe that an example of a good (but not perfect) model for the tech side of personalized medicine can be found at the Duke IGSP. Please see this URL if you’re interested:  http://www.genome.duke.edu/cores/

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What is “The Cloud”?

comes into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new , training new personnel, or licensing new software. Cloud computing encompasses any subscription-based or pay-per-use service that, in real time over the Internet, extends IT’s existing capabilities.

There are several ways to classify different cloud architectures, but the three most prevalent are:

  1. Infrastructure as service         [example: ]
  2. Platform as service         [example: 's]
  3. Software as service        [examples:  Salesforce,  ]

The issues surrounding the cloud (besides the obvious one of vendors rapidly pushing incomplete software to market) are:

  1. Latency
  2. Performance
  3. Security

I’ll talk about each of these in turn in the next few posts. BTW… This website is hosted in the cloud – Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) – to be more precise.

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