ORLANDO, Fla. – A technology called TreatmentMAP, developed by German biotech company Molecular Health, won the SAP Hana Technology Trailblazer Award at this week’s Sapphire Now event.
TreatmentMAP received the award for using big data to create personalized treatments for cancer patients by combining individual tumor genetics information from patients with the whole of global biomedical knowledge. The award is handed out to the company that is best using big data and the “Internet of Things” to achieve breakthrough results.
The application combines cutting-edge genetic analysis with an enormous and complex data warehouse, which runs on SAP Hana. Pulling from more than 10 years worth of centrally located data from Molecular Health’s data warehouse, certified oncologists then use TreatmentMAP to analyze genome information.
“We constantly comb the latest relevant publications, review them and supplement our data warehouse,” explains Markus Schmitt from Molecular Health. “It now contains more than 23 million publications. Hundreds of cancer indicators, 37,000 drugs, more than 90,000 clinical studies and much more other information are curated here.”
Molecular Health has been using TreatmentMAP to recommend therapies since early 2014. Through its database, TreatmentMAP can generate up to 100 GB of data for each patient and recommend a treatment in just a few hours.
The goal is to create a scale-out model to treat more patients at the same time. SAP expert Kai Sachs said, “Our objective is to run these analyses concurrently for 50, 100, or more patients,”
There is about 700 megabytes of “pure data” generated from each person’s DNA, which creates a problem when trying to treat thousands of patients. In order to achieve necessary throughput, the SAP Hana platform is designed to allow analytics and calculations to be performed directly on the data.
For more on how big data is changing the medical field, check out 5 ways big data is changing the world.
