The real informatics challenges of personalized medicine: not just about the number of central processing units

Personalized medicine has the potential to revolutionize patient care. In order to do so, it requires a re-engineering of many life sciences and healthcare processes, the most significant being the integration of the complete biomarker lifecycle from discovery to targeted treatment of patients. Individual patient omic profiles have become a reality owing to the diminishing cost of DNA sequencing. However, managing these data has created a bottleneck due to: the limitations in storage, computing power and information access; the lack of biologist-friendly software to replace the user-unfriendly custom scripts, which are crippling collaboration; the urgency for standardizing data across omics and clinical data realms for cross-study comparisons; undermining innovations of enterprise and open-source software, which saps innovations of open-source and reliability and support of enterprise software; and unavailability of a robust, integrative workflow system, which leads to actionable data at the patient care level.