A case study of human genome-supported changes in the understanding of diseases
Personalized cancer-treatment
To defeat cancer there are hundreds of diffrent medicaments, which can be applied in various doses and ingestion-frequences. The aim is to identify the most effective medication with the slightest byeffect(s) to heal the patient. It is a very complex and time-consuming challange for the oncologists to find the matching treatment-strategy for the patient. Here genome-sequencing can help: Through compare the genome data of cancer-cells with the data of a healthy cell (naturally from the same patient) and the data of other patients (the DNA-data of both, healthy and cancer cell, is two terabytes big, that means three billion datapoints), oncologists can now work more efficient. Because it's impossible to regard all factors manual, geneticists (enterprise MolecularHealth) work together with computer scientists (enterprise SAP). An application should help oncologists by comparing the DNA-data with the help of a big database. "This in turn means that medics such as oncologists will have more time for their core duty – looking after their patients."
Relevance of the complete human genome
In this case, like in the most cases, not the whole genome is important for the diagnostic / treatment. Relevant are especially the genes that differentiate in healthy and defective cells, because they are responsible for the malformation of the affected cells.
Change of survival of the patient (my opinion)
I guess the probability to improve the survival-chance of a cancer-patient through aply genome-sequencing, especially in combination with clever softwares, is really big. In short time this method shows the diffrences between the healthy and the cancer-genome. That shortens the diagnosis and the treatment-plans significant.
Once there will be a mature software with a big (DNA-)database of many cancer-patients. If then a scanned genome of a cancer-patient matches with the data of a succesfully cured former patient, a good treatment is instantly available. That doesn't mean, that it must be right the very best treatment for this patient, but it supplies the oncologists a very good initial situation and spares them a lot of time, that raises in turn the survival-probability of the patient.
http://www.sap-investor.com/en/2012/quarter-4/sap-hana/fighting-cancer-with-sap-hana.html
