At a recent event sponsored by the White House, the National Science Foundation and the Networking and Information Technology R&D program, SAP AG was recognised for its collaborative efforts to enable real-time personalised medicine through innovation with Stanford University and the National Center for Tumor Diseases Germany. The Washington, DC-based event, Data to Knowledge to Action, featured public and private organisations that enhance scientific discovery and biomedical research and derive greater value for consumers by innovating Big Data tools and technologies.
“Big Data is transforming the ways in which we live and has the potential to accelerate the pace of discovery in almost every science and engineering discipline,” said Farnam Jahanian, head of Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the National Science Foundation. “Collaborative efforts like those featured at Data to Knowledge to Action are advancing the role that Big Data can play in future innovations across all sectors, from education to healthcare.”
The SAP HANA platform targeted to the needs of healthcare aims to offer researchers, hospitals and pharma and insurance companies with biological, lifestyle and clinical data to help optimise patient health by personalising prevention, treatment and health maintenance. In an SAP-funded collaboration with Stanford University Professor of Genetics Carlos D Bustamante’s lab at the Stanford School of Medicine, researchers are using SAP HANA for real-time analytics to help uncover genetic variants that contribute to population health and disease. Since using SAP HANA, Stanford researchers have seen significant improvement in performance, with 17X to 600X faster computations when analysing their genomic data, revolutionising the ways in which they can gain insights into the biology of certain diseases. Ultimately, the goal is to develop new treatments for autism and cardiovascular disease, conditions that have a profound impact on the health of millions and add tremendous costs to the healthcare system.
Outside the US, SAP is collaborating with the National Center for Tumor Diseases in Heidelberg, Germany, to pilot analysis and collaboration tools based on SAP HANA. These tools are designed to enable physicians and researchers to securely analyse clinical and genomic data in real time to help dramatically improve cancer diagnostics, identify personalised treatment options and facilitate matching patients with the best clinical trials.
EH News Bureau
