Conference Presentation, Lecture
Atul Butte | Driving Public Health: A Trillion Points of Data
- Biomedical data generation rates are doubling every two to three years, with publicly available samples currently near two million and expected to grow exponentially to enable global access for individuals regardless of location.
- Legacy classification systems like ICD-10 are projected to become obsolete within 20 years, replaced by molecular profile-based coding that redefines disease classification and supports the transition from diagnostic to molecular medicine.
- Computational analysis of public data is anticipated to facilitate drug repositioning, with specific predictions identifying new uses for existing drugs like imipramine for small cell lung cancer and launching clinical trials within 15 months.
- Data-driven clinical trials utilizing public datasets can be initiated for approximately $50,000, a cost structure suitable for seed grants rather than multi-million dollar budgets, shifting the industry focus toward garage-based biotechs developing treatments for cancer and diabetes.
- Five University of California health systems plan to consolidate electronic medical records from EPIC, Allscripts, and Cerner into a single warehouse containing 14.1 million patient records, treating interoperability as an engineering challenge rather than a barrier.
- A new facility scheduled for construction in 2019 will house a control room with monitors visualizing disease trajectories for all 14 million patients to predict health outcomes for the next 90 days and one year, redefining accountable care organizations.
- Efforts are underway to establish a new team at UCSF and expand the clinical data warehouse staff to 40 individuals across the University of California system to manage data derived from public sources, patient emails, and cross-system records.
- While acknowledging that results are not guaranteed, the approach aims to generate treatments that demonstrated efficacy in mouse models to advance human trials for severe conditions, complementing basic healthcare needs rather than substituting them.