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The Big Data of “Exceptional Responders”

As many as 1 in 10 patients respond well in clinical trials of experimental medicines that U.S. regulators end up rejecting, according to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). To understand why these patients had such a response, researchers are beginning to use DNA sequencing technology to determine if the patients they call “exceptional responders” carry gene variations that can lead to better targeted therapies, including new treatments and the reconsideration of others.

Traditional treatments such as chemotherapy kill healthy cells along with malignant ones, but targeted therapies are designed to leave healthy cells unscathed and home in on cancer cells that make tumors grow and spread. The catch is that they don’t work for everyone, and even patients who find them helpful tend to develop resistance over time. The NCI and academic medical centers including Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, and the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Mass., are creating a national database of exceptional responders to aid research. “What was yesterday’s miracle event is today becoming a subject of scientific inquiry,” says Leonard Lichtenfeld, an oncologist and the deputy chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society.

BusinessWeek

Google X: People “who know less and less about more and more”

Google already has a large lab division, Google Research, that is devoted mainly to computer science and Internet technologies. The distinction is sometimes framed this way: Google Research is mostly bits; Google X is mostly atoms. In other words, X is tasked with making actual objects that interact with the physical world, which to a certain extent gives logical coherence to the four main projects that have so far emerged from X: driverless cars, Google Glass, high-­altitude Wi-Fi balloons, and glucose-monitoring contact lenses. Mostly, X seeks out people who want to build stuff, and who won't get easily daunted. Inside the lab, now more than 250 ­employees strong, I met an idiosyncratic troupe of former park rangers, sculptors, philosophers, and machinists; one X scientist has won two Academy Awards for special effects. Teller himself has written a novel, worked in finance, and earned a PhD in artificial intelligence. One recent hire spent five years of his evenings and weekends building a helicopter in his garage. It actually works, and he flew it regularly, which seems insane to me. But his technology skills alone did not get him the job. The helicopter did. "The classic definition of an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing," says DeVaul. "And people like that can be extremely useful in a very focused way. But these are really not X people. What we want, in a sense, are people who know less and less about more and more."

FastCompany