“Genomics certainly is Big Data,” explained Toby Bloom, Ph.D. She regularly analyzes an estimated “12 terabytes a day” and stores up to “20 to 30 terabytes a day” as the deputy scientific director, Informatics at the New York Genome Center.

Bloom remarked during an interview with SiliconANGLE’s Media production team, theCUBE, that she deals with billions of A, C, T, and Gs — the four letters that make up DNA — everyday in her quest to uncover where each one fits in a genome, as well as their variance and which are related to disease. Currently, Bloom and her team are working to improve the algorithms and analytics used to process the donated genomes. All of the information goes into an HP Vertica database.

Big Data helps disease-related research

The New York Genome Center was founded through a collaboration of 12 different medical centers and now has 17 centers contributing to them. The basic process is to take the donated DNA from tubes and cut it, then sequence those sections and pattern-match them to a reference genome. That may sound hard enough without considering that with any given genome, a technician is looking at 1 to 2 million differences from the reference genome. From there, the goal is to identify the biological process that is related to a disease and interfere with drug treatment. It is important to note that the Center does not do treatment, although its research does lead to better results.

As of now, the Center has funding for specific disease-related research, but the average donation’s sequencing is generally financed by the donor. Genomics have already led to advances in cancer and cystic fibrosis research, and Bloom believes we will see “within a decade even more progress” if funding issues can be resolved.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the HP Big Data Conference 2015.

Photo by SiliconANGLE