How can big data be utilized in cancer treatment?

ByKamiPhuc

In 2015, pharmaceutical company Roche spent more than 1 billion dollars (about 111.1 billion yen) and acquired Foundation Medicine, which is about half its own company. Foundation Medicine has DNA sequence data of tumors of more than 35,000 cancer patients and by acquiring Roche can access the database of Foundation Medicine. The database contains information such as which medications cured what kind of cancer, what kind of medicine was effected in what kind of data, and Roche aimed to develop new medicines for cancers using big data is. A blog post on 2015 that shows an example of such "using big data for cancer treatment" has been posted on Nautilus.

Cancer on Nautilus: How Big Data Can Help Fight Cancer
http://cancer.nautil.us/article/167/how-big-data-can-help-fight-cancer


Diagnosis of cancer is often carried out by accumulating poor information, as an example, first specifying the part of the body that is in disorder, how is the state of the cell visible under a microscope, how much tumor has proliferated You can find out who you are. Based on the results, it is said that diagnosis is given as "colon cancer stage 2". This process is sophisticated year after year, but it seems that many of the types of cancer to be further classified are also collected, even at the same site.

Accurate classification of cancer is a major issue in cancer treatment. At the time of anticancer drug at the time of 2015, the cure rate is for a proper tumor and the cure rate is around 22%, unless it can accurately identify the type of tumor, the cure rate of anticancer drug will decrease. There was also data that at the time of 2015, 39.6 billion dollars (about 4,400 billion yen) out of the 50 billion dollars (about 5,559 billion yen) annual expenditure spent on anticancer drugs wasted . Sometimes anti-cancer drugs are sometimes called "trial and error drug".

There is a possibility that such a situation can be ameliorated for cancer tumorDNA sequencingis. By examining the DNA sequence, even if it says simply "kidney cancer" "lung cancer", they can be classified into thousands, tens of thousands of diseases, mutation patterns and molecular level abnormalities differ. In the study of kidney cancer in 2014, it is known that no abnormality of the same gene or a tumor of the same mutation was found from 2 patients. In another breast cancer study, as a result of subjecting the tumor to DNA sequencing, it seems that two identical cells were not found from one tumor.

However, by identifying mutations in individual cancer cells, it is possible to establish a coping strategy for each, so pharmaceutical companies will be able to develop molecular targeted therapeutic agents for the identified cancer cells . It is thought that anti-cancer drugs for cancer cells specified by DNA sequencing have higher effects than conventional anti-cancer drugs. In the field of breast cancer, cancer genesHER2 geneIs a standard treatment, but this test can not detect other mutations. Therefore, searching for mutations comprehensively will function as a better approach.

ByPolygon Medical Animation

The data collected by the Foundation Medicine from cancer patients is exactly similar, and the sample received from the patient, regardless of which part of the cancer such as breast, bone, lung, etc., is about 300 He said he was scanning the mutation. From this data, we will be able to select existing anticancer drugs effective against specific cancers and develop more effective new drugs.

It is not easy to utilize big data for cancer treatment like this, but success cases have already come out from the database of Foundation Medicine. Corey Wood, one of the database of 35,000 people, was diagnosed as having stage 5 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) metastasized to bone and eyes, but it is cured by medication therapy. In general, the cure rate of anticancer drugs used in non-small cell lung cancer is only about 20%, but by analyzing the database, another anticancer agent not used in conventional treatment is used It seems that what you did was successful.

ByNEC Corporation of America