Data for tailor-made care
What is personalised healthcare?
Every person is unique. Personalised healthcare relies on increasingly precise information about each person (medical data, biological and genetic analyses, lifestyle habits and environment) to offer better targeted care tailored to each individual.
Why is it complex?
The same disease can develop very differently from one person to another. These differences are the result of complex interactions between genes, environment and lifestyle specific to each individual. Understanding them requires analysis of many factors, while guaranteeing the security and confidentiality of health data.
More data for better care
Molecular analyses, medical images, everyday connected sensors... our health data is multiplying. Isolated, they tell us little. When integrated and compared with each other, they provide clues to help us better understand diseases and guide medical decisions more accurately.
Over 90 per cent of common diseases (such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular disease) involve numerous genes – as well as environmental factors.
Source: Lewis & Vassos, Genome Medicine, 2020
In Switzerland, data from more than 800,000 patients is available for research purposes through the Swiss Personalised Health Network (SPHN).
Source: Swiss Personalised Health Network / SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics
The human genome contains around 6 billion DNA ‘letters’. Reading them all – a process known as sequencing – can generate more than 100 GB of raw data for analysis.
Source: Stephens et al., PLOS Biology, 2015
Here, bioinformatics makes it possible to:
Share healthcare data securely
Analyse and link complex data
Identify individual risk factors
Speed up diagnosis
Guide the choice of the most appropriate treatment