We participated in Stanford University’s “Big Data in BioMedicine” conference the past few days here in Palo Alto. It was an invigorating 3 days of interactions with the worlds leading scientists, researchers, doctors, and technologists which furthers Code-N’s resolve to play a key role in this mission. As stated by Dr. Lloyd Minor, dean of the Stanford’s School of Medicine, it will take an “interdisciplinary group to change the status quo.” Code-N is playing a part of that change (see this Life Science Trends 2014 excerpt). Dr. Minor went on to say that “Big Data is the connecting piece that enables us to get research to benefit patients.”
Later on, there were talks about how repurposing drugs using Big Data is a natural fit. That is exactly what we found when applying our concept-based technology to connect the massive amounts of data from publications, gene and protein databanks and pharmacology databases. After connecting billions of scientific data statements into a highly concentrated, hyper-connected “knowledge cloud,” we are able to come up with new purposes for drugs in a matter of seconds.
As Vinod Khosla says, “Data isn’t important. Insight is what’s important and using it for actionable insights is the only thing that matters.” Code-N is applying actionable insights into many biopharmaceutical endeavors, such as how a leading cholesterol drug could be repurposed to help reduce the symptoms of multiple sclerosis.
There was a sign posted during the conference that read “Data is Frozen Knowledge. It is waiting for its heat, light and energy to be released.”
We agree.