Fighting Cancer With Data

Cancer remains one of the world’s biggest problems, with approximately 18 million cancer cases and 9.6 million deaths reported in 2018. Contributing to these numbers is a global population that is both growing and ageing, as well as the changing prevalence of certain causes of cancer linked to social and economic development the world over.

- Santhosh Viswanathan

While we have seen some decreased incidence rates for lung and cervical cancers, most countries are still faced with an increase in the absolute number of cancer cases diagnosed, requiring treatment and care.

Bottom line, the clock is ticking, and there is an urgent need to accelerate our efforts in finding new treatment methods and hopefully, a cure.

And while we’ve been placing our bets on technology to help in this quest, perhaps what is also needed is a different perspective on the issue of how to approach the problem at hand.

That is exactly what one of our colleagues at Intel, Bryce Olson, chose to do.

In 2014, Bryce was diagnosed with a very aggressive stage-four prostate cancer and was told that he had less than two years to live. Having a young daughter who was still in primary school, Bryce did not want to give up. He went through all the standard treatments that you can get for cancer – radiation, surgery, and chemotherapy; none of it worked.

We live in a time where technology is already being used in medical research for the purposes of speeding up genomics sequencing. At the same time, the medical industry was also exploring precision medicine: The ability to provide a customized series of treatments, tailored to the specific patient, based on his or her genetic context.