Golem: A disruptive platform to access and interactively analyse genetic data

Being able to extract useful information from genetic and health data is a key challenge for the next decade.

Human genomic data is doubling in size every seven months and may soon exceed other Big Data generators such as astronomy, YouTube and Twitter. Although this data is revolutionising medicine and development of new therapeutics and diagnostics, reaching the full potential of this substantial investment relies on our ability to unlock clinically actionable knowledge from it. The key to this is ensuring data access and analysis capabilities are democratised over a range of researchers and institutions with different capabilities, whilst ensuring individual level data is kept safe. However, obstacles to this remain, owing to the data's unprecedented size, complexity, and restricted access (relating to privacy concerns, economic interests, research limitations, and multi-institutional data fragmentation).

This project will lead to the development of a disruptive commercial platform changing how data is accessed and how value is extracted from it. This will have impacts in several areas, including:

* Increasing efficiency of drug development.
* Reducing NHS expenditure, by reducing drug side effects and overall improvement of personalised medicine.
* Increasing productivity of high tech jobs.
* Overall improvement of academic research in genetics. Including helping to understand why COVID-19 differently impacts different people.
* Reducing carbon footprint in big datacenters through the use of much more efficient computing algorithms.
* Empowering the individuals to control what happens with their data.

If successful, this project will contribute to the UK's ambitions of leading the field of genetics and creating the right fabric for developing an important, high-tech industry for the next decade.

This is a highly scalable project targeting a rapidly growing international market at the very important intersection between computer science, genetic and epidemiological data analysis, and human health. It is also timely, addressing an important challenge that is within the government four Grand Challenges as well as many objectives highlighted in the Innovate UK Horizons Tool. Overall, if successful in our ambitions, we could significantly contribute to the UK's aspirations as a relevant player offering solutions for the next decade's forthcoming challenges whilst strengthening and supporting GDP, develop and attract international talent, and globally create high quality jobs.