Curing Cancer one line of code at a time!

Jasmin Fisher, a biologist who works in Microsoft’s Cambridge, U.K lab said “We’ve reached the point where we are drowning in information. We can measure so much, and because we can, we do. How do you take that information and turn that into knowledge? That’s a different story. There’s a huge leap here between information and data, and knowledge and understanding.” The first approach is using computation and “machine learning” to identify, analyze and organize millions of pieces of medical data and research. Organizing all of the data through computation reduces the intense amount of individual work, and also reduces the amount of error through manual input.

The second is using cloud computing to collect and share data across multiple fields, from doctors, to biologists, to researchers and patients. Microsoft’s Azure cloud is the perfect platform for this. “If you look at the combination of things that Microsoft does really well, then it makes perfect sense for Microsoft to be in this industry. We can use methods that we’ve developed for programming computers to program biology, and then unlock even more applications and even better treatments,” said Andrew Phillips, head of the biological computation research group at Microsoft. Here’s hoping that one day Cancer treatment will simply be “take two of these and call me in the morning.”