Do You Know What Life Will Be Like In 5 Years? IBM's Top Scientist Does (2)
2. Doctors
Will Use Your DNA To Keep You Well
In
the next five years, genetic sequencing and cognitive computing will make personalized medicine available at a
scale and speed that was never previously possible.
Despite
tremendous advances in cancer research and treatment, every year nearly 13
million new cases of cancer are diagnosed and 8 million people die from various
forms of the complex disease. With growing aging populations, global cancer
rates are expected to jump by an astounding 75% by 2030. Cancer also represents
about 20% of all health care costs, placing a heavy burden on governments,
health systems, providers, and patients.
Initial diagnoses of diseases like this, today, are often
inaccurate, and treatment is prescribed in a one-size-fits-all manner. "We
have historically attacked cancer based on symptoms and the location of the
disease. This can result in costly treatment that is ineffective and could even
be harmful."
Researchers believe that in the next five years, the integration of genetic sequencing
with cloud-based cognitive systems will help doctors accurately diagnose cancer
and create individualized treatment plans for millions of patients around the
world.
Even better: the system will continually learn and get
smarter, so the standard of care for patients with cancer--and any disease with
a DNA link, like heart disease and stroke--will continue to climb.
“Health care is a tremendous opportunity,” says Meyerson.
"You've already heard these sort of miraculous results people are getting
in treatment of various bloodborne cancers--leukemia, lymphoma--where people
are taking the genetic makeup of either the actual cells that are essentially
problematic, the cancer cells, and/or your genetic makeup, and from that they
can actually determine what the most effective treatments will be based on that
genetic knowledge.”
“At
the end of the day it all comes down to the ability to not only custom design a
treatment, but to also look at a seemingly infinite number of treatments that
have been performed on a specific disease and very quickly, through the use of
analytics, determine which one of those is proven to be on average the most
effective,” Meyerson explains. “Once you get the amount of information that's
out there correlated and take these unstructured doctors' notes and other
things like that and use them, it will be a real game changer.”
http://www.fastcoexist.com/3023514/futurist-forum/do-you-know-what-life-will-be-like-in-5-years-ibms-top-scientist-does?partner=newsletter
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