DATA SCIENCE: Or, why you should have studied computers in school.

Our skinny period

Would you have guessed that the U.C. San Diego School of Medicine employs someone described as a “Data Scientist?”  Well, read this article and you will see why. 

https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2016-07-21-researchers-ID-cancer-gene-drug-combos-for-precision-med.aspx

Faithful Readers, and there are thousands, already know all about precision medicine – that is, the creation of drugs or drug combinations that target specific mutations.  They also know that before a drug can be marketed it must receive the blessing of the FDA.  The FDA also weighs in on whether a drug approved for, say, colorectal cancer can be used to combat, say, melanoma.  Evidence that such a drug allocation might be useful rests consists of evidence that the misbehaving biological pathways in both cancer types stem from the same mutation(s).

Well, ye gods!  There are hundreds of cancer types involving thousands of mutations.  Moreover there are so many drugs, extant and conceivable, that only God (and the FDA, of course) can keep track of them.  Ergo: a Data Scientist is required. No doubt she drives a Porsche.

This article shows how one goes about determining which drugs will work on which cancers.  The work to date mainly involves yeast; our furry murine friends are threatened.  There is so much work to do that the UCSD people are attempting to farm it out internationally.  ISIS need not apply.