Google has joined the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, the company announced on its Research Blog today. In an effort to help healthcare providers and others analyze the huge volumes of genomic information available today, Google is proposing one Web-based API for importing, processing, storing and searching genomic data at scale. Google is also proposing that its cloud infrastructure be used to implement that API to handle multiple apps.
Jonathan Bingham, Google product manager, is confident Google’s tools can help researchers use genomic data to quickly and more easily make informed healthcare decisions. He writes:
Imagine the impact if researchers everywhere had larger sample sizes to distinguish between people who become sick and those who remain healthy, between patients who respond to treatment and those whose condition worsens, between pathogens that cause outbreaks and those that are harmless. Imagine if they could test biological hypotheses in seconds instead of days, without owning a supercomputer.
The Alliance, of which the American Association for Cancer Research, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Massachusetts General Hospital, the University of California at Santa Cruz and more are members, is an international group of organizations dedicated to creating secure and ethical ways to share genomic information and clinical data among research and healthcare communities.
What do you think Google will bring to the Global Alliance for Genomics and Health?
