by Alex Cabral figures by Sean Wilson In 2003, with the completion of the Human Genome Project, the entire human genome was sequenced for the first time. The sequencing cost nearly $1 billion and took 13 years to complete. Today, the human genome can be sequenced for about $1000 in less than two days. Industry leaders hope to bring that cost down to just $100 within … Continue reading The Computer Science behind DNA Sequencing
by Krissy Lyon Think about your daily commute. How many times have you hit every green light while driving or stepped out your front door just in time to catch your bus? If you’re like me, then your answer is probably never. But what if you could catch the bus right on time every day? Hundreds of Silicon Valley companies already collect and analyze data … Continue reading Smart Cities: Can tech improve our towns?
by Aparna Nathan Hospitals are churning out medical data at an unprecedented rate. 153 billion gigabytes of health care data were produced in 2013, and we’re expected to reach 2300 billion gigabytes per year by 2020. That’s almost 9 billion MacBooks’ worth of storage each year, not even counting the hundreds of thousands of genomes sequenced each year. It’s more than a human can process … Continue reading Computational Biomedicine: How data can revolutionize the patient experience
We cannot predict how long we each live, but can our genes? For as long as longevity has been a desirable good, it has never been equally distributed across humanity, not even within families. The role of heritable traits in longevity is still debated. Previous genomic studies have reported a low heritability for longevity. However, inadequate sample sizes prevent these studies from examining the influence of … Continue reading Crowdsourced Data Helps Scientists Construct the World’s Largest Family Tree
by Jessica Sagers figures by Brad Wierbowski The only word Charles Chidsey could think of to describe his situation was hairy. “Moderate hypertrichosis has been observed in five of eight patients on chronic treatment,” he noted in a comment near the conclusion of his study. Chidsey, physician and Associate Professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine, was puzzled to note that routine administration … Continue reading Re-Engineering Cures for the Big Data Age: Precision Medicine and Computational Drug Repositioning