George Poste | Big Data and the Evolution of Precision (Personalized) Medicine

The convergence of molecular biology, informatics, sensor and mobile device technologies and social media is forging a new era of precision medicine in which large scale data on disease processes in individuals and populations, their environments and their behavior will enable disease detection, treatment and prevention to be based increasingly on individual-specific (personalized) parameters to achieve better health outcomes at lower cost. The long term trajectory for precision medicine will progressively shift the focus of care from the current episodic, reactive responses to illness to proactive, continuous real-time monitoring of health status for earlier detection of disease, improved treatment compliance and other risk reduction strategies to prioritize maintaining health versus managing illness.

Realization of these aspirations will generate data on an unprecedented scale. The rise of precision medicine and data-intensive medicine are inextricably linked. The current health care ecosystem is ill prepared for this union and its implications for the future medical curriculum, new skill needs for physicians, infrastructure and personnel for advanced data analytics, the evolution of new models of healthcare delivery and the entry of influential new participants from the computing, logistics and consumer realms hitherto uninvolved in healthcare.

This lecture was part of the University of Michigan's MIDAS conference hosted at Rackham Auditorium; The Future of Data Science: A Convergence of Academia, Industry, and Government schedule. The Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) is the focal point for the new multidisciplinary area of data science at the University of Michigan. MIDAS was created in July 2015 as part of the University of Michigan Data Science Initiative. MIDAS will be comprised of an interdisciplinary core faculty of 40 data scientists (from statistics, biostatistics and mathematics, computer science and engineering, information science, and a range of data science intensive application experts). MIDAS will also include a Data Science Challenge Initiatives Program (Learning Analytics, Transportation, Social Sciences, Personalized Medicine & Health); a Data Science Education and Training Program; as well as an Industry Engagement Program.

[VicenteMReyes]

If the cancer has already metastasized, will "personalized medicine" (PM) still work? How can PM possibly get rid of the countless cells that have spread to other organs?