Camille Terfve, associate and patent attorney at IP firm Mewburn Ellis assesses what the emergence of big data means for medical sciences.
Big data
What is bioinformatics?
Bioinformatics is a term which we will use as an umbrella to encompass work that may also be referred to as computational biology or medical informatics. It is an interdisciplinary field of science that combines biology, computer science, mathematics, statistics and engineering (including their subfields such as control theory, information theory, thermodynamics, machine learning and artificial intelligence) to analyse and interpret biological and medical data. Indeed, both molecular and phenotypic data has become available on an unprecedented scale from genomics, proteomics, functional genomics, high-throughput cell screening, metabolomics, and imaging platforms (amongst other).
This data enabled researcher to study biological systems at both higher specificity (enabling us to look simultaneously at single molecule, molecular species or cells) and breadth (enabling us to look at entire proteomes, genomes, metabolomes, transcriptomes in a single assay). This data has further been combined with higher level medical data such as .g. the presence of a disease or subtype of disease, data about response to treatment, relapse, comorbidity, medical history to develop a better understanding of the aetiology of diseases, and to tailor therapies to patient’s molecular profiles.