Big data to advance personalised medicine

A five-year research project into personalised medicine for common diseases, to be conducted at The University of Queensland (UQ), was this week awarded $7 million by the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

Professor Peter Visscher, Professor Naomi Wray and Associate Professor Jian Yang, from UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute, will put the funding towards high-throughput computing power to analyse genomic data sets collected from hundreds of thousands of people.

In their pitch to the NHMRC, the researchers explained how areas such as social media, weather forecasting and mineral exploration are driven by big data. At the same time, disease prevention, diagnosis and prediction are moving towards personalised and precision medicine. Their research therefore aims to develop analysis methods that can be applied to clinical genomics data in common diseases.

“Our research focuses on patients with neurological and psychiatric disorders including motor neuron disease, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, autism and schizophrenia,” Professor Visscher said.

“The analysis methods and tools we develop will pave the way for translating the technology to other common diseases such as obesity, diabetes and cancers.”

Professor Wray added that the new analytical methods and tools will be disseminated through software, promoting their translation to clinically relevant applications and “allowing other researchers to apply our research across the full range of common diseases”.

The study is one of 96 projects to share in $129.4 million in healthcare grants announced by Minister for Health Sussan Ley this week. Other projects focused on topics such as Indigenous health in the Northern Territory, developing an AIDS vaccine and tackling over-diagnosis in the Australian health sector.