Truision was honored to host, Tsvi Gal, CTO and Head of Enterprise Technology at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) and Juan Perin, Senior Director and Chief Architect of Research and High Performance to discuss “Making It Real: How Using Advanced Technology Saves Lives”. Below is a summary of the presentation alongside Tsvi and Juan’s bios.
Tsvi Gal
Established in 1884 as the first cancer-only hospital in the world, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) now has 21,000 staff members including 7,000 researchers in 168 labs across all disciplines of research. MSK is working to make cancer a manageable and curable diagnosis, a dream that’s not terribly farfetched with the aid of research and development.
Technology is facilitating more personalized treatments which have a significantly higher success rate, zero chance of rejection (due to using the patient’s own stem cells), and avoids the side-effects of chemo. Even at the height of COVID, MSK was at 85% patient capacity and offered specialized care for those with COVID. The challenges in doing so strengthened MSK’s commitment to technology and with the temporary closure of wet labs, further encouraged digging into existing digital data. MSK has also been experimenting with chemo at home with kits to facilitate the process, indicating the breadth of what’s possible through telemedicine.
Juan Perin
The team at MSK is supporting and advancing cancer research through the combination of hospital care and research which enables a steady flow of information and knowledge throughout the ecosystem. Most importantly however, MSK’s position as a pre-eminent basic and translational research facility rests, in part, on its ability to rapidly process significant quantities of clinical and scientific data.
As a result, data is at the center of everything MSK does, building a comprehensive picture of working to cure cancer. Data is generated and collected from both the hospital (MSKCC) and the research arm (Sloan Kettering Institute) through:
- Clinical and research DNA sequence data
- Structural and cell biology CryoEM, lightsheet and confocal microscopy data
- Computational biology- Drug design, modeling and simulations, pathology/radiology image analysis
Genome sequencing has been an important source of research, with each genome having 6 billion bytes of data. MSK looks at genome sequences across nearly all patients and analyzes the change across their cells so that these can be leveraged to identify the best drugs and treatments to best target their cancers. MSK runs the most clinical trials than any other organization in the world.
Computational pathology enables machine learning of data for faster, more precise recognition. AI can be leveraged to enable more effective diagnosis of biopsy tissues.
Microscopy enables deeper detail and more data during analysis. What would have taken thirty days to process now takes only a day. With access to so much data, MSK leverages machine learning to filter data and assist doctors and researchers to make informed decisions.
In order to store and analyze the large amounts of data being generated into a comprehensive center of knowledge, MSK uses high performance computing. MSK has a massive 42 petabytes of information being stored across 700 servers. To put this into perspective, 1.5 petabytes of data is the equivalent of 10 billion photos being stored on Facebook.
The future of data storage and analysis will move from workstations to on-premise HPC and eventually to the cloud. The infrastructure would maximize access to optimizing this centralized data and optimize resulting data insight. It’s also important to note that MSK also takes patient security seriously, removing identifiable information without compromising the effectiveness of the research.
Due to this incredible paradigm between research and clinical care, MSK has the unique opportunity to revolutionize the way we treat patients and deliver advanced care for cancer. MSK hopes to simplify the human experience and how we interact with these technologies around us, allowing everyone from the healthcare providers, the doctors, nurses, patients, and even the general population to benefit from what’s been learned from this data. The ultimate vision is to have a broad understanding of every data point accessible both in healthcare and research. Digital twins will enable researchers to more efficiently utilize simulations to do the same research they’ve been doing in the virtual space. As an example, researchers can take a drug’s results on mice and virtually apply the drug to a digital twin of a human immune system and observe the results– eventually negating the need to do physical experiments completely.
About Tsvi Gal
Tsvi Gal has been appointed by Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center (MSK) as Chief Technology Officer and head of Infrastructure, effective April 2020. In this role, Tsvi will set the technical vision and lead the company’s technological development in support of the digital strategy and make technical recommendations that align with MKS goals. Tsvi joins MSK from Morgan Stanley where he served in numerous roles including CTO of Enterprise Services, Head of Strategy & Architecture and others. Since he joined in early 2012, Tsvi was responsible for the creation and implementation of Morgan Stanley’s multi-year strategy and target state architecture and the evolution of the bank into a modern, efficient and effective organization. Prior to Morgan Stanley Tsvi has served in various CIO and CTO in several banks including Merrill Lynch/Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and Wells Fargo as well as in non-banks including Exigen Capital (a private equity firm) where he was a General Partner, AT&T where he was President of ATT.COM and Time Warner Music where, as CIO, he led the launch of the digital transformation towards on-line music. Tsvi is a recipient of the Einstein Award for Technology and Science from the President of Israel for pioneering on-line banking and trading, Tsvi’s career spans over three decades.
About Juan Carlos Perin
With foundations and experience in Molecular Biology, Physics, Bioinformatics and Computer Science, Mr. Perin enables scientific progress by providing both the technical and application level support to investigators and physicians throughout MSK. Prior to MSK, Juan was working at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia where he help lead a team of Bioinformaticians to deliver computational solutions for data intensive research needs. It is from this foundation that he came to MSK to expand upon his passion for applying technology to demanding research needs. Throughout his time at MSK, Juan has grown from serving as the Director of High Performance Computing (focused primarily on basic research needs), then as Senior Director for all Research Computing needs, and now as the Technical Strategy lead for Technology services at MSK, ensuring success in the ongoing advancements in technologies at MSK.
