For New Era of Personalized Medicine, Google to Store Individual Genomes in the Cloud

By scaling its already formidable storage and computational capacities, Google plans to store individuals’ genomes in the cloud so they can be analyzed en masse by healthcare researchers. Called Google Genomics, the search giant and eccentric technology company wants to usher in a new era of personalized medicine which experts expect will treat diseases by responding to a person’s individual genetic make up.

The market is a potentially enormous one, and besides Google, other companies like Amazon, IBM, and Microsoft are gearing up to offer healthcare institutions an easy way to do research that has been impossible until this moment. Google is prepared to store an entire genome in the cloud for $25.

“The idea is to create ‘cancer genome clouds’ where scientists can share information and quickly run virtual experiments as easily as a Web search, says Sheila Reynolds, a research scientist at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle.”

In his Big Think interview, Pfizer Vice President Aidan Power insists personalized medicine will be the defining paradigm for discovering and developing drugs of the future: