Fujitsu aims to build systems that apply big-data analytics to help identify courses of therapy and preventive treatment for patients, linked to their digital medical charts. Fujitsu's idea is to build a health and treatment platform that integrates the chart with a biomolecular database for each patient, containing
Fujitsu aims to build systems that apply big-data analytics to help identify courses of therapy and preventive treatment for patients, linked to their digital medical charts.
Fujitsu's idea is to build a health and treatment platform that integrates the chart with a biomolecular database for each patient, containing information on his or her genome as well as protein and metabolite data.
By also incorporating information from pharmaceutical companies on drug studies and side effects, the big-data analytics will identify such factors as the patient's genetic idiosyncrasies, propensity to develop different diseases, and response to different cancer drugs. The detailed information will be shown on the digital medical chart.
Fujitsu will shop the idea around to hospitals starting this year. The company believes that the systems could come into use for personalized medicine as early as 2020.
Around half of all large hospitals in Japan with at least 300 beds have already adopted digital charts, according to Fujitsu. But the amount of data in the charts would balloon more than 1,000-fold if it also includes the patient's biomolecular information, so Fujitsu will harness its supercomputing technologies for the analysis. For this purpose, the company is investing some $19.4 million between now and 2016.
The company plans to invest $292 million yen over the next 5 years, seeking to double health-care-related sales to $1.9 billion.