Databases vs Cancer Cells: A Clash of Titans

Cancer is to human life what Professor Moriarty was to Sherlock Holmes: malicious (or so we judge it to be), stealthy, persistent and elusive.

The latest weapon in the fight against cancer comes, not ironically, from the land of Sherlock: Britain.

The British government has decided to set up a database that provides doctors with treatment guidelines for every kind of cancer. If you think this is overkill, please take note that cancers in each part of the body can occur in myriad mutations, with a different course of treatment being required for each mutation. Gone are the days when there was only one treatment for say, breast cancer. A legion of breast cancer variations have since been catalogued, each calling for a unique course of medical action.

It helps to first gain a fundamental appreciation of the problem of cancer, which the below video ably provides:

The British government has budgeted 100 million pounds to sequence the genetic codes of 100,000 patients suffering from cancer and certain rare diseases. Along with this information will be a description of which treatment worked well for each patient.

In the future, when a person is diagnosed with cancer, his genes will be sequenced and the database queried for the treatment suitable for that sequence. The result will be highly targeted treatments with much higher possibilities of success than those chosen by present-day, non-database-driven methods.

Typical Database Architecture

If it strikes you that you could reap similar benefits from a database tailored to your area of work, please go to our database developer page, browse it and message us from the form on the page.

We shall use technology to understand and defeat cancer, and we SHALL succeed!