An emerging trend in healthcare is the use of data analytics. This allows us to predict, for example, the occurrence of a disease or, at an individual level, whether a person is more likely to develop a certain disease or whether a woman is more likely to give birth prematurely.
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In November 2023, the UK Biobank published the complete genetic sequences of 500,000 people. This is a treasure trove that scientists can use to uncover connections between DNA and disease.
By analyzing these genomes in conjunction with clinical data, researchers can identify genetic markers associated with disease, predict patient outcomes, and tailor treatments based on individual genetic profiles.
This approach has tremendous potential in addressing complex conditions such as cancer, cardiovascular disease, and rare genetic disorders.
The UK Biobank has released a large dataset, but it's tiny compared to the ocean of data out there. Billions of data, including images (X-rays and other scans), await researchers' attention.
Incidentally, researchers at AIIMS in Delhi are collecting images of oral cancer and precancerous cases and labeling them. With 5,000 labeled images on hand, they aim to do 10 times as much work as her.
A US hospital chain uses data to analyze the medical conditions of kidney donors and recipients to determine suitable matches.
Similarly, there is a wealth of data on the commercialization side of pharmaceuticals.
There is a wealth of data to decipher everything from patient behavior management to how drug sales representatives best approach specific physicians.
Analyzable data
However, the data resides in silos and is not immediately passed for analysis (detecting non-trivial trends). Someone has to “integrate” the data to make it “analytics-ready.”
A US-based startup called Asyridium Consulting, founded by Raj Babu from Chennai, is working to prepare data analytics.
In some ways, Agilisium encapsulates two intertwined trends in the data industry. It's a business opportunity to integrate and “clean” data to make it suitable for analysis. And thanks to cloud computing, costs have been significantly reduced.
Babb previously worked at 20th Century Fox and Universal Music Group, where he had to sift through data to suggest the best times to put movies on and off shelves or stock DVDs on Walmart shelves. there was.
A field-trained man, he combined the “agility” of data with his favorite science fiction movie starring Matt Damon. Elysium I started Agilisium Consulting 10 years ago. Its services include data architecture consulting, data integration, storage and analytics.
In some ways, Agilisium is similar to ChatGPT on an enterprise level. More than 70% of the 850-odd staff is based in Chennai.
in a conversation with quantumBabb cited the example of Amgen, a U.S.-based biotech research company that was overwhelmed by the amount of data sets it had and sought Agilidium's help processing it.
When asked if managing such a large amount of data requires large-scale computing power, Babu said the company takes its computing power from the cloud.
Agilisium is an “AWS or Amazon Web Services Partner,” which means we provide AWS cloud services and solutions to our customers.
Amgen says it reduced data processing time from 48 hours to 12 hours and was able to ingest petabytes of new data sets without disrupting system performance.
“We went from hundreds to thousands of users while reducing data metric errors,” said Sheetal Pillai, senior manager of commercial data science at Amgen. These new approaches to data management and processing have enabled Amgen to scale up quickly, reduce time to market, and free up more computing power.
million dollar pitch
Agilisium recently announced a $1 million donation for collaborative innovation.
The pitch is that if you have a problem and data that can be used to solve it, we will invest $25,000 (in terms of professional time, cloud capacity purchases, etc.) to provide a solution. . What you get from Agilisium is that you not only get chunks of code that you can apply elsewhere, you also get learnings.
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None of this is possible without significantly lowering the cost of adopting cloud services. Currently, you can store 100 TB of data in Azure for $1,600 per year. Amazon S3 offers the same for $2,100. Previously, when we had to buy servers, it cost millions of dollars.
Babu says India has the potential to become the “data-driven digital R&D hub of the world”.