Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) and Intel are teaming up to develop next-generation computing technologies that advance the field of personalised medicine by dramatically increasing the speed, precision and cost-effectiveness of analysing a patient’s individual genetic profile.
Through a multi-year research and engineering collaboration, engineers and scientists from the two institutions will develop hardware, software and workflow solutions for Intel’s extreme-scale, high-performance computing solutions. This new level of computational horsepower seeks to make strides in addressing one of the biggest challenges in personalised medicine: how to cope with the unprecedented volume of complex biomedical data it generates.
The collaboration combines Intel’s strengths in extreme-scale computing capable of handling billions of complex computations simultaneously with OHSU’s innovative four-dimensional approach in imaging and analysing the molecular-level drivers of cancer and other diseases.
OHSU’s imaging techniques work like a Google map for cancer, by providing a highly detailed view of how cells change over time at the molecular level along with a big-picture analysis of how the cells behave as a system.
The team’s approach will be to create information tools that can handle the mind-boggling volumes of data generated in the process – doing it more rapidly, more precisely and less expensively than is capable with current technology.
The objective is to drive scientific progress in understanding the genetic origins of illness, starting with cancer, at an individual-patient level and ultimately, to make precision medicine a more routine model of patient care.
