Google Cloud has partnered with the US National Cancer Institute (NCI) to help support breast cancer research through access to large cloud-based datasets and powerful resources to analyse them.
The partnership expands on existing work by the NCI using Google Cloud’s BigQuery to securely host and analyse terabytes of genomic and proteomic data, which has helped scientists around the globe to no end.
By working with Google, and specifically BigQuery, NCI hopes to make data and resources available to scientists across the world, potentially leading to breakthroughs in cancer research.
A worthy cause
“We are spreading the message of the cost-effectiveness of the cloud,” said Dr. Kawther Abdilleh, lead bioinformatics scientist at General Dynamics Information Technology, a partner of the Institute for Systems Biology-Cancer Gateway in the Cloud (ISB). “With Google Cloud’s BigQuery, we’ve successfully demonstrated that researchers can inexpensively analyze large amounts of data, and do so faster than ever before.”
According to Breastcancer.org, around one in eight US women will develop invasive breast cancer over the course of her lifetime. In 2021, around 43,600 women in the U.S. have died from breast cancer; the death rates are higher than any other cancer besides lung cancer.
As such, any work on the issue is incredibly worthwhile and will ultimately help to save lives. Leveraging Google’s Cloud resources to make advances in analysing big datasets is a great example of how technology can be used to save lives.
According to senior ISB researcher Dr. Boris Aguila: “Google’s AI platform, for example, allows us to easily create notebooks to use R or Python in combination with BigQuery or machine learning to perform large-scale statistical analysis of genomic data, all in the cloud. This type of analysis is particularly effective when the data is large and heterogenous, which is the case for cancer-related data.”
