Big Data in Biomedicine

PharmGKB Developers and Curators attended the Big Data in Biomedicine conference this week, organized by Stanford University and the University of Oxford. The talks and panels raised a plethora of issues surrounding storing, sharing, analyzing, validating, visualizing and utilizing Big Data for improving healthcare and to drive change. Among the challenges is the need to integrate multiple big data sources together (genomic, metabolome, transcriptome, medical records, behavioural, environmental). Empowering patients, reproducible statistical analyses, and bioinformatics education were also discussed.