News and insights

Subscribe to our newsletter

Improved support of cloud infrastructure is essential to the delivery of the next generation of treatments for major diseases like cancer

Today in the journal Nature prominent researchers from Canada, Europe and the U.S. have made a powerful call to major funding agencies, asking them to commit to establishing a global genomic data commons in the cloud that could be easily accessed by authorized researchers worldwide.

It’s a bitter irony that, for those in the global health community contending with viral outbreaks, many of the barriers to mounting an effective response are man-made. Geopolitical and cultural divides that separate us as people can inhibit research efforts and humanitarian aid. Viruses, meanwhile, pay little heed to such arbitrary boundaries; they prey instead on what we all have in common — our shared, human biology.

Nearly a decade ago, the FDA approved the drug lenalidomide to treat patients with deletion-5q myelodysplastic syndrome (del(5q) MDS), a cancer of the myeloid cells in the bone marrow that form several types of blood cells. In this condition, some bone marrow cells are missing a portion of chromosome 5 – hence, the “del(5q)” – on one copy of their genome (the human genome has two copies of each chromosome, one from each parent), and this deletion causes malignant cells to grow unchecked.