The Biotech industry is hugely important to the New England area, which is why we’re so excited about the work Professor Wu Feng has been doing down at Virginia Tech. For years Feng has been exploring how computers can help advance medical knowledge, and recently he has begun using computing—cloud computing to be precise—to revolutionize medicine as we know it.
Building on years of research and experimentation, Feng and his team developed a new product that harnesses the cloud’s massive computing resources to analyze vast amounts of DNA and genome sequencing data much faster than ever before, cutting the processing time from weeks to mere minutes. These tools, which use the computing power and infrastructure of Microsoft’s Hadoop-based Azure HDInsight Service, will allow researchers, colleges and universities that lack Virginia Tech’s resources to collaborate in real-time and run complex simulations far more quickly, allowing them to develop better, safer treatments for a number of diseases, including lupus and cancer.
There’s a whole lot more to this story than will fit in a blog post, so check out our feature story to find out why Feng and Virginia Tech are at the forefront of the medical revolution.