The path from big data to precision medicine

ABSTRACT

Precision medicine aims to combine comprehensive data collected over time about an individual’s genetics, environment, and lifestyle, to advance disease understanding and interception, aid drug discovery, and ensure delivery of appropriate therapies. Considerable public and private resources have been deployed to harness the potential value of big data derived from electronic health records, ‘omics technologies, imaging, and mobile health in advancing these goals. While both technical and sociopolitical challenges in implementation remain, we believe that consolidating these data into comprehensive and coherent bodies will aid in transforming healthcare. Overcoming these challenges will see the effective, efficient, and secure use of big data disrupt the practice of medicine. It will have significant implications for drug discovery and development as well as in the provisioning, utilization and economics of health care delivery going forward; ultimately, it will enhance the quality of care for the benefit of patients.

KEYWORDS:

• Big data
• EHR
• mHealth
• genomics
• data integration
• precision medicine
• real world evidence
• data analytics

Acknowledgements

The authors thank members throughout Johnson & Johnson and external partners for discussions, scientific and technical collaboration in addressing the challenges of precision medicine and Big Data.

Financial and competing interests disclosure

The authors are employees of Janssen Research & Development and Johnson & Johnson Innovation (Johnson & Johnson compaines). The authors have no other relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript apart from those disclosed.