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SAP and MolecularHealth Join Forces to Shape the Future of Personalized Cancer Treatment
Published Nov 13, 2012
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SAP AG and MolecularHealth, a leader in clinico-molecular informatics™,announced that they have joined forces to improve oncologists’ clinical decision-making and enhance the quality of care for cancer patients. A personalized cancer treatment services offering from MolecularHealth based on the SAP HANA® platform aims to translate terabytes of clinical, molecular and drug data into real-time and effective treatment choices for each individual patient. Benefitting from the unprecedented speed and performance of SAP HANA, the new offering is intended to successfully tackle the challenges of “big data,” complex analytics, scalability and increasing healthcare industry costs. The solution is planned to be deployable in the cloud, on premise or in a hybrid model, as well as to be made available via mobile devices. The collaboration with MolecularHealth, recently formalized in an original equipment manufacturing (OEM) agreement, underlines SAP’s commitment to supporting the paradigm-shifting information-driven revolution in personalized cancer treatment.
Oncologists constantly face the challenge of identifying the correct treatment approach for an individual patient with cancer. This decision involves choosing the most effective medications with the least toxicity, or “personalizing” treatment for a specific patient based on the unique characteristics of their cancer.
“The growing numbers of available therapies and the rapidly expanding body of biomedical knowledge have led to great hope for treating patients, but at the same time there are increasing challenges due to the complexity in the clinical decision-making process. But today the practice of medicine is undergoing a technology-driven revolution to realize the goals of truly personalizing therapy and improving clinical efficiency,” said Lloyd K. Everson, M.D., former vice-chairman and member of the Board of Directors of US Oncology and former member of the Board of Directors, president and chief operating officer of American Oncology Resources, Inc. “MolecularHealth has taken a unique approach to the integrated analysis of clinical and genetic data. The company is contextualizing these data with drug-related information for precise and safer treatment considerations by doctors. Powered by SAP HANA, MolecularHealth’s personalized cancer therapy solutions aim to help oncologists achieve the potential of precision medicine.”
There have been extensive advances in cancer treatment over the years, but many if not most cancers, especially in advanced stages, remain difficult to treat. Personalized cancer therapy seeks to dramatically improve these poor outcomes. Recent advances in technology — particularly genome sequencing — enable analyzing a patient’s individual cancer and matching findings to existing drug choices. By conducting genomic sequencing on both a patient’s normal cells and cancer cells, and then examining the differences that may have an impact on the disease, key clinical insights can be gleaned. Personalized medicine aims to achieve a higher effectiveness of drug selection and an improved understanding and subsequent avoidance of adverse side effects.
Addressing Challenges at the Heart of Genomics
While selecting from a host of approved drugs and clinical trials poses a real challenge to today’s oncologist, SAP HANA can bring a dramatic acceleration to the decision-making process. The MolecularHealth offering, supported by the platform, is planned to be capable of translating genomic sequences of both tumor and normal cells — more than 3 billion data points — into potential treatment strategies. Physicians are planned to be able to select a treatment strategy for each patient from hundreds of approved drugs and clinical trials — a process that today involves significant time and complexity. Genomic sequencing data amounts to approximately 2 terabytes of information per patient. Printed on paper, this amount of data would fill a medium-sized elementary school library.
“The partnership between two exceptional players in their respective fields creates a unique opportunity to enable better decision-making in the healthcare industry,” said Friedrich von Bohlen, chairman of the Executive Board, MolecularHealth. “Personalized cancer therapy solutions integrate cutting edge technologies with critical molecular, clinical and drug information to inform decision-making.”
The offering from MolecularHealth supported by SAP technology aims to change the way patients are treated and how the industry operates by providing customized treatments. Based on SAP HANA, a combination of mobile and cloud offerings are also planned, along with offerings for other diseases. A network that includes oncologists, researchers, regulatory authorities, life-sciences corporations, sequencing labs and care centers will be able to further change the way people with cancer and other diseases are treated. The underlying technology is intended to enable fast, real-time data analysis to boost operational efficiency and scalability. Additionally, as the cost to sequence a patient’s tumor drops, the use of genetic data is quickly becoming actionable in the clinical setting. As a result, healthcare professionals such as oncologists will have more time to focus on their core mission — patient care.
“With our market-leading innovations and our investments in research and healthcare IT solutions, we have the ability to support the fight against cancer together with MolecularHealth,” said Jim Hagemann Snabe, co-CEO, SAP AG. “We partner and drive co-innovation with companies that are dedicated to making a difference. Our investment in technologies and platforms such as SAP HANA, cloud and enterprise mobility enables us and our partners to deliver on our vision and commitment to make the world run better and to improve people’s lives.”
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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