A Vision for a Biomedical Cloud

by: Grossman RL, White KP

We present a vision for a Biomedical Cloud that draws on progress in the fields of Genomics, Systems Biology, and Biomedical Data Mining. The successful fusion of these areas will merge biomarkers, genetic variants, and environmental variables to build predictive models that will drastically increase the specificity and timeliness of diagnosis for a wide range of common diseases, while delivering accurate predictions about the efficacy of treatment options. However, the amount of data being generated by each of these areas is staggering, as is the task of managing and analyzing it. Adequate computing infrastructure needs to be developed in order to assemble, manage, and mine the enormous and rapidly growing corpus of ‘omics’ data along with clinical information. We have now arrived at an intersection point between genome technology, cloud computing and biological data mining. This intersection point provides a launch pad for developing a globally applicable cloud computing platform capable of supporting a new paradigm of data intensive, cloud-enabled Systems Medicine.
© 2011 The Association for the Publication of the Journal of Internal Medicine

Grossman RL, White KP. (Feb 2012) A Vision for a Biomedical Cloud. Journal of Internal Medicine. Vol. 271 (issue 2):122-30. the Institute for Genomics and Systems Biology, Departments of Medicine and Human Genetics, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

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