Cancer Treatment Update: Scientists Use Astronomical Data To Fight Cancer

Researchers at the National Cancer Institute will continue to create cancer-combating studies using data analysis methods produced by data researchers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, one of NASA's centers, as their research partnership was renewed on Sept. 6, 2016, thus extending up to year 2021. Over the last 15 years, their research collaboration includes the development of scientific data initiated in space research and today promotes new cancer findings.

NASA researchers are always trying to work out ways to dig up and manage all the data their spacecraft has hauled into their exhaustive list of observatories, arrays, satellites, and probes. Many thanks to the renewed research partnership contract between the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), cancer experts can still take advantage of the huge data techniques made by scientists from NASA.

A lot of the algorithms of NASA work by interpreting huge quantities of data for differences that may be attention-grabbing to physicists and space scientist all over the world. Researchers of the NCI funded Early Detection Research Network or EDRN wants to do the exact thing. Their goal is to incorporate all their research data in a searchable, single network, with the goal of decoding their combined work into methods for early identification of cancer risk or cancer, according to ScienceDaily.

During the time the EDRN and JPL worked together, 6 new cancer biomarkers FDA-approved and 9 biomarkers FDA-approved to be used in Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments laboratories were discovered. ScienceDaily noted that FDA has permitted those biomarkers to be used in cancer diagnosis and research. NASA reports that those biomarkers have been utilized in over 1 million patient diagnostic tests all around the world, according to OHS.

"From a NASA standpoint, there are significant opportunities to develop new data science capabilities that can support both the mission of exploring space and cancer research using common methodological approaches," Dan Crichton, head of the Center for Data Science and Technology of JPL, explained in JPL's latest news release. Crichton helped to create a JPL-based information center devoted to support EDRN's big data techniques.