1. 帮助指导使用已通过的癌症药物
虽然临床试验为医生们提供了许多药物如何发挥作用的有用信息，但是大概只有2%的癌症患者参与了临床试验。 事实上，每天都有成千上万的患者接受诊断和治疗。这意味着其实我们可以从中获得大量的重要数据,来帮助医生与病人在面对不同治疗方案及其可能的结果时做出更好的选择。
美国临床肿瘤学会ASCO发起建立一个数据库:CancerLinQ,旨在获取这些数据。它能将数据提供给医生们, 为他们提供实时的治疗建议。美国基因泰克公司（Genentech）的科学家和医生们都对能帮助ASCO开发一个完善的CancerLinQ系统感到兴奋。
2. 决定每位患者的预后治疗
了解患者的预后，可以帮助医疗团队决定对患者癌症的治疗强度，以及在肿瘤消失后需采取的措施。大数据正在借助分析从大量不同患者搜集过来的海量信息，来预测长期结果。例如，医生可以使用这些信息来决定哪些患者应该接受进一步治疗，哪些患者，由于他们的癌症不太可能复发而避免不必要的治疗。
3. 帮助药物开发发掘潜在的新靶点
对大量肿瘤DNA进行测序可以帮助研究人员了解一些与癌症相关的基因变化。科学家利用这一点帮助测试潜在的新药物，这些药物能靶定到某些与肿瘤生长相关的基因变化或驱动因子。大数据可以从临床前试验中获得，并用来帮助药物或药物组合的选择，以放到人类临床试验的研究中。
4. 解决大的公共卫生问题
流行病学研究包括癌症在内的人类疾病的起因及模式。在大数据时代之前，人们发现吸烟是导致绝大多数肺癌的因素。现在，大数据可以帮助解决癌症研究中更大的问题。新时代的流行病学借助于海量的住院记录及基因组数据，深入研究不同人群中的不同癌症。
5. 允许病人直接参与进来
癌症患者现在可以通过提供基因，医疗记录及治疗效果等数据，直接参与癌症研究。这些信息用于建立大型的研究数据库。
英语原文：
5 things Big Data CAN do in cancer research
1. Help Guide the Use of Approved Cancer Medicines
While clinical trials provide valuable information to doctors on how medicines may work, only about 2% of people with cancer participate in clinical trials. However, thousands of people are diagnosed and treated every day, which means there is a huge amount of important data that could be obtained to help doctors and patients make better decisions about treatment options and potential outcomes.
ASCO has started an initiative, CancerLinQ, to try to capture some of these data. CancerLinQ is a system that connects doctors with data, helping to inform decisions about treatments in real time. Scientists and doctors at Genentech are excited to help ASCO develop the full CancerLinQ system.
2. Determine an Individual Patient’s Prognosis
Knowing a patient’s prognosis allows medical teams to decide how aggressively to treat each cancer and what steps to take after a tumor is gone. By analyzing information from incredibly large and diverse groups of patients, big data is helping to predict long-term outcomes. For example, doctors can use this information to determine who should receive additional treatment and who might avoid it because their cancer is unlikely to recur.
3. Help Discover Potential New Targets for Drug Discovery
The ability to sequence the DNA of large numbers of tumors has allowed researchers to understand the genetic changes underlying certain cancers. Scientists can use this information to help test potential new medicines that might target some of these genetic changes or drivers of cancer growth. Big data sets from preclinical studies are being used to help predict which medicines or combinations of medicines might be good candidates to move forward into clinical trials in humans.
4. Answer Big Public Health Questions
Epidemiologists study the causes and patterns of human diseases including cancer. In the era before big data, they discovered that smoking causes the vast majority of lung cancer cases. Now big data is allowing them to answer even bigger questions in cancer research. This new era of epidemiology takes advantage of the availability of large collections of hospital records and genomic data, leading to new insights into diverse cancers in diverse populations.
5. Allow Individuals to Get Involved
People with cancer can now play a direct role in research by contributing genetic data and information about their health and how treatments have affected them to large databases used for research.
via：大数据文摘（公众号：BigDataDigest）校检：兔八哥
