Danny Hillis, who has long been a hero of mine for his work in computer science, is turning his incredible smarts to cancer.
Danny spoke at TEDMed about genomics and proteomics and cancer. Very interesting stuff.
The genome tells us the *predisposition* towards some disease most of the time. E.g. BRCA1 and 2 gene mutations indicate a high predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer.
Proteomics is the study of proteins in your body, and represents what’s happening in the body now (as opposed to predisposition to what might happen). Danny’s company, Applied Minds, has build a robot to measure proteins. He approaches cancer as something we do rather than something we have. We have problems that can create cancer all the time, and much of the time our body heals itself. When we get cancer, our bodies are failing in that healing in some way. He hopes that studying proteomics will help us understand why the body is failing to heal itself, and allow us to design treatments that are specific to a person.
He does a great job of explaining all the science in the TEDMed talk:
http://youtu.be/J85O5F7dVuU
Links to the video, mp3 and full text of the talk can be found at this Edge article.
