In 2020 the pharmaceutical industry in particular and the world of health in general, faced an unprecedented challenge: to develop a vaccine in record time to combat an emerging disease that had quickly turned into a pandemic that kept humanity in suspense. However, a good part of this acceleration was supported by the use of new technologies.

Indeed, the correct management of large volumes of data is essential to accelerate medical research, since it allows optimizing and testing models, and avoids delays in clinical trials.

This is perhaps the most visible face of how big data can generate a definitive change in the way we understand health: its ability to process medical records, genetic material, hospital data, symptoms and much other information; and combining it in an intelligent way results in the development of more successful therapies and unequivocal precision in diagnoses.

Prevent and fight cancer

This power to accelerate big data research, diagnosis and treatment, in combination with other advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence, is leading to remarkable advances in fighting cancer.

For example, there are already advances in the diagnosis of brain tumors in just three minutes from the analysis of a large set of CT scans and the detection of abnormalities. The same is the case with breast cancer: it is estimated that it will be possible to predict it at a speed thirty times faster than what humans do and with an accuracy of more than 99%. Another case: the early detection of pancreatic cancer, essential in the context of a disease that, in 80% of cases, is diagnosed when it is too late to try a cure.

It is a fertile ground that is just beginning to be explored and that will offer us good news in the coming years.

The system in tension

One of the great challenges facing big data in healthcare is optimizing the operations of companies in the sector. The ways to achieve this are multiple.

For example, this technology can be applied to identify risk groups for a certain disease, outline preventive actions and reduce the rate of that disease in the population.

It is not a minor issue: another point that 2020 made clear is that the health system is in tension and that certain measures are necessary to make operations more efficient and to better manage available scarce resources.

In this sense, prevention is essential: it removes people from the system keeping them healthy through self-care processes, brings greater awareness about their own health status and allows remote monitoring of the population, both those who are in treatment and in proactive terms: all these variables can also be driven and disseminated from big data strategies.

Towards personalized medicine

Big data is also a first step towards the concept of “personalized medicine”. Historically, laboratories defined generic products or treatments for a particular disease and then applied them to large populations – anyone who manifested the symptoms received the same drug.

However, time has shown that the prescription is not effective in all the people who take them. Today, advances in genomics, combined precisely with big data, make it possible to predict whether a particular patient is fit to receive treatment, whether he will suffer side or adverse effects, and in what degree he will give the expected results.

Personalized medicine not only produces benefits for the patient and their families, since there are more possibilities that the treatment will lead to a successful conclusion, but it also optimizes the always scarce health resources: the waste of medicines that will not be effective is avoided and decreases the number of hours of professionals who must observe the patient multiple times until the appropriate treatment is given.

Big data is a tool that enables more and better health: not only for patients, but also for companies in the sector.