Apps Are Nice but Silicon Valley Should Focus on Health Moonshots

In my 35 years roofing the tech industry, I have heard from executives—over and over—how their inventions will alter the world. While this is true—the semiconductor, PC, and smartphone come up to mind—I accept been wondering lately if Silicon Valley should take stronger aim at solving the globe's major healthcare dilemmas. On cancer, Silicon Valley has been pretty active already. NVIDIA, for instance, teamed up with the National Cancer Institute, the US Department of Energy (DoE), and several national laboratories on an initiative to advance cancer research.

Opinions The try will focus on building an AI framework called CANDLE (Cancer Distributed Learning Environment), a concept that is designed to provide "data scientists around the world with a powerful tool against this illness," NVIDIA revealed.

"GPU deep learning has given u.s. a new tool to tackle grand challenges that have, up to now, been too complex for even the near powerful supercomputers," Jen-Hsun Huang, Founder and CEO of NVIDIA said in a printing statement. "This ambitious collaboration is a giant jump in accelerating one of our nation'due south greatest undertakings, the fight against cancer."

The CANDLE projection includes 3 precision medicine pilot projects that aim to "provide a better understanding of how cancer grows; discover more effective, less toxic therapies than existing ones; and empathize cardinal drivers of their effectiveness outside the clinical trial setting, at the population level," according to a description.

Equally is, one of Silicon Valley'due south giants, Intel, partnered with the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, the Knight Cancer Establish at OSHU, and other medical groups focused on this terrible disease to create the Collaborative Cancer Deject, a database that it will use to aid advance the inquiry on finding better ways to treat cancer and, ideally, a cure.

My big business organisation almost these efforts is that it appears these databases do not yet talk to each other, largely because of current security and privacy laws regarding data sharing. This has to be dealt with sooner, rather than later on, if whatever of these companies and partnerships want to find a cure for cancer presently. If information technology happens, at that place seems to exist a consensus in the wellness community that we could encounter some existent breakthroughs in finding a cure for cancer in the near time to come.

About Tim Bajarin

Tim Bajarin

Tim Bajarin is recognized as 1 of the leading industry consultants, analysts, and futurists roofing the field of personal computers and consumer applied science. Mr. Bajarin has been with Artistic Strategies since 1981 and has provided research to well-nigh of the leading hardware and software vendors in the industry including IBM, Apple, Xerox, Compaq, Dell, AT&T, Microsoft, Polaroid, Lotus, Epson, Toshiba, and numerous others. Mr. Bajarin is known as a curtailed, futuristic analyst, credited with predicting the desktop publishing revolution three years before it striking the market, and identifying multimedia every bit a major trend in written reports as early as 1984. He has authored major industry studies on PC, portable computing, …