SCIENCE

The Council on Competitiveness, in partnership with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is releasing a case study today highlighting the potential for high performance computing (HPC) to spur innovative solutions for the challenges facing the health care industry. The report, "Bringing the power of HPC to Drug Discovery and the Delivery of 'Smarter' Health Care," studies how HPC and computer-aided engineering is helping GNS Healthcaredrive the identification of the right cost-effective intervention for the right patient at the right time.

Advanced computing technology is transforming the biomedical industry, from the discovery of new drugs to the discovery of biomarkers to match patients and drugs, to the analysis of observational patient data to reduce adverse drug events.

"Today's advanced computational capabilities are essential, given the fact that the scale, complexity and availability of the data derived from DNA sequencing machines and other sources such as observational claims and diagnoses data has progressed tremendously in the last five to ten years," says GNS Healthcare President and CEO Colin Hill. "We have this strong conviction that the major game-changing advances in the biomedical sciences, drug development and patient care will not occur on a short time-scale without the extreme use of supercomputing."

The report is one of ten case studies to be released under the project with DARPA. The purpose of the case study series is to address the challenges facing the U.S. manufacturing sector and how the use of HPC can increase national productivity and competitiveness.

Over the last few years, advanced modeling and simulation technology has made previously impossible or impractical analytics in healthcare achievable.  Identifying critical causal genes in a tumor, a process that once took years, can now be completed in just days, and with a much higher level of sophistication.  Similarly, learning models to predict effective treatments for individual patients in light of their other conditions and drugs taken, a task involving evaluating trillions of relationships, can be completed within a week.

"The demand for innovative, cost-cutting health care solutions is among the greatest opportunities to simultaneously enhance America's standard of living and its ability to compete in the global economy," said Council Senior Vice President Dr. Cynthia McIntyre, who is leading the national focus on expanding HPC. "The widespread adoption of high performance computing will have an enormous impact on the cost of health care and its affordability for all Americans."