By Ludwig Burger

FRANKFURT (Reuters) - Software engineers are moving to the fore in the war on cancer, designing programmes that sift genetic sequencing data at lightning speed and minimal cost to identify patterns in tumors that could lead to the next medical breakthrough.

Their analysis aims to pinpoint the mutations in our genetic code that drive cancers as diverse as breast, ovarian and bowel. The more precise their work is, the better the chance of developing an effective new drug.

Ever since James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the structure of DNA in 1953, scientists have been puzzling over how genes make us who we are. The confluence of computing and medicine is accelerating the pace of genetic research.

But making sense of the swathes of data has become a logjam.

That, in turn has created an opportunity for computer geeks and tech firms such as Microsoft, SAP and Amazon.

Oncology is the largest area of therapy in the global drugs market with market researcher IMS predicting it will increase to $83-$88 billion by 2016 from $62 billion in 2011. Computational genomics - using computers to decipher a person's genetic instructions and the mutations in cancerous cells - is emerging as the driver of this growth.

Life Technologies Corp and Illumina Inc are among firms developing equipment that can extract a person's entire genetic code - their genome - from a cell sample.

The newest machines are about the size of an office printer and can sequence a genome in a day, compared with six to eight weeks a few years ago. They can read the 3.2 billion chemical "bases" that make up the human genetic code for $1,000, compared with $100,000 dollars in 2008.

Growing numbers of software engineers are needed to help make sense of all this data.

Originally posted here:
Insight: Crunching the numbers to boost odds against cancer

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