Innovative data processing technologies allow for new form of medicine, called Personalized or Precision Medicine (PerMed), which is using information about a person’s genes, proteins, and environment to prevent, diagnose and treat diseases. Each type of cancer has its own genetic makeup, giving each tumor cell and tissue a unique character with specific tendencies and vulnerabilities.

PermMed has a big impact on the early detection of rare diseases. Currently, the diagnosis takes a lot of time. Moreover, patients receive often maladjusted treatments because a precise analysis of a specific rare disease is extremely difficult. Most of the identified rare diseases are still not curable, primarily due to the lack of an exact understanding of the underlying disease mechanisms. The analysis of the whole genome is seen as a key to the disease mechanisms but requires the computing of large amounts of data.

Generating results quickly and accurately from medical processes is today a primary concern. The work of medical doctors is depending more and more on computer systems that can support their decisions on the right treatment while providing direct access to the underlying reasoning. The use of decision support tools is increasingly complemented with data provided from mobile devices and sensors. They bring complementary info on the patient's profile and help disease management between visits. Real-time analysis of data was used in a pilot involving patients suffering from Parkinson disease. The pilot takes place in Luxembourg.The data generated by the sensors from the smart shoes they were using showed changes in the movement pattern before the patients suffer from the typical freezing that leads to many falls and injuries. The extremely fast analyse of this data could provide warnings to patients in time to avoid accidents.

In addition, PerMed applications have a significant impact in the planning and evaluation of clinical trials. Several research and development initiatives have been launched to build data and software resources able to combine text analysing and genome mining tools. This approach is considered the most promising strategy in the research for new treatment methods.

All these approaches of PerMed require the processing of large amounts of data and often rely on systems requiring a fast in- and output. Benchmarking tests at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine (LCSB) have shown that the use of high performance computing can reduce the time needed to process a full genome - as needed for rare diseases - from one day to 20 minutes.

Using big data in the medical field has more advantages: it leads to more efficient data handling and new security technologies for a trusted management and transfer of clinical data.

Prof. Dr. Rejko Krüger, Neurologist and Neuroscientist at the Luxembourg Centre for Systems Biomedicine said: "Understanding the factors that influence human health and cause disease and using that understanding to develop treatments has always been the driving force behind medical research. Modular, flexible computing performance addressing also high-content and high-throughput computing will trigger a disruptive change that will dramatically alter aspects of personalized medicine. Computational tasks that today would take weeks will be completed in a few days; hour-long computations suddenly become interactive because they could be completed in seconds."