Add Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle to the growing list of facilities looking to transition to the cloud.
Newly announced CIO Matthew Trunnell, who will assume the role Aug. 31, told the Wall Street Journal he will be looking to cloud computing to replace legacy software and computer systems.
Trunnell will oversee the research center’s enterprise information technology efforts.
“It’s clear that we’re outgrowing our current architectures, in terms of physical architectures and software design, across the board in the industry,” Trunnell said. Fred Hutchinson will be looking at how corporate and high-tech industries have adopted cloud computing, and will be considering the offerings of fellow Seattle-area giants Microsoft and Amazon, he added.
Next-generation computing architectures, Trunnell said, are essential to handle advancements in research informatics, particularly precision medicine, which involves gene sequencing of tumors, and big data analytics.
Fred Hutchinson is trying to aggregate and analyze data from various sources, including clinical data from electronic medical records, to better understand the causes of disease.
Amazon and Google are both vying for rights to store human DNA in the cloud, a market expected to be worth $1 billion by 2018.
What’s more IBM, last month, announced plans to collaborate with 14 cancer institutes across the country to create more personalized treatments for patients. To that end, Big Blue’s announcement this week of massive investment in the Apache Spark open source big data project also means furthering its Watson technology for healthcare, according to Fast Company. Advances in big data and cloud computing are providing more democratic access to the reams of information the government collects, providing it to any vetted research institution.
Still, earlier this year, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center CIO John Halamka wrote in the Wall Street Journal, that CIOs must look at cloud services with a discerning eye. CIOs, he said, should look at a variation of software as a service he referred to as “Outcomes as a Service,” which is operated by a third party and thus does not require new hardware or software installation. The variation, he said, is the blending of business processes, people and technology work to achieve goals.
In Outcomes as a Service “economic incentives are aligned perfectly … because downtime or poor application functionality results in immediate reduction in cloud vendor income,” he said.
M.D. Anderson Cancer Center cited advancements in gene sequencing and computational capabilities are among the factors making possible its Moon Shots program aimed at eight types of cancer.
Researchers are steadily able to reduce the cost and time required for sequencing. A University of Chicago-based team, using a dedicated supercomputer, found a way to analyze 240 full genomes in just two days.
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