Bioniformatics: Breaking the Bottleneck for Cancer Research
by Nicholas McGranahan
In recent years, biological sciences have witnessed a surge in the generation of data. This trend is set to continue, heralding an increased need for bioinformatics research. By 2018, sequencing of patient genomes will likely produce one quintillion bytes of data annually – that is a million times a million times a million bytes of data. Much of this data will derive from studies of patients with cancer. Indeed, already under The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA), comprehensive molecular analysis, including exome sequencing and expression profiling, has been performed on more than 10,000 patients.
