The potential for data to drive huge changes in healthcare are significant, and it’s a topic I’ve touched upon numerous times before.  As the volume of health-related data we have available increases however, the costs involved in processing the data rise in tandem, both in terms of the time spent crunching the data and the money involved in doing so.

A team from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai believe they’ve come up with a tool that takes what would ordinarily require months and can do it in minutes instead.  The tool, which was described in a recently published paper, promises to transform how biomedical research data is shared.

The authors explain how the main method for sharing such data at the moment has been via scientific journals.  They aim to transform this by allowing sharing to instead be performed via their new tool, called BioJupies, which uses cloud-based technology to both analyze and visualize large quantities of medical data.

Sequencing RNA

By far the most common method of profiling cells in biomedical research is RNA sequencing.  Technological advances in recent years has transformed how we examine genetic data, which in turn promises to revolutionize medicine.  RNA sequencing traditionally requires an awful lot of computing power, which makes the work slow and laborious.

BioJupies promises to speed this up considerably, with the cloud-based tool reducing the cost involved in standard RNA sequencing to less than 1 cent per sample.  What’s more, the tool also helps with the analysis of this data by producing an open source and interactive report from the data.  To date, this has allowed for around 300,000 publicly available RNA datasets to be reanalyzed and reused.

“As the amount of biomedical data generated continues to climb exponentially, so should the tools used to analyze and share them,” the researchers say. “BioJupies not only accelerates the manner in which we analyze and interpret data, but it also provides a completely new way to share results with the global research community.”

The industry has become incredibly good at collecting vast quantities of medical data in recent years, such that the challenge has now largely moved onto how to make sense of the data quickly and efficiently.  Tools like BioJupies go another small step towards enabling just such a future.