The January 2017 issue of Chicago magazine (available online now) has a lengthy feature by Tom Chiarella about the Genomic Data Commons and the GDC's co-principal investigator Robert Grossman.
Drawing on an interview with Grossman in the GDC, Chiarella calls the GDC "a true pivot in the fight against cancer" and breaks down the implications of the availability of all the GDC's data for researchers, doctors and patients. Because this big data set allows users not only to group tumors genetically instead of by location in the body, but also to sort for other factors like age, gender, lifestyle, and habits of the patient, treatment can be tailored to each individual. And the data is available to anyone, not only those affiliated with hospitals or universities. Thus, the cure for cancer, Chiarella notes, might "come not out of laboratories, hospitals, or even pharmaceutical giants but instead from some yet-unwritten algorithm built from this mound of data being assembled here in Chicago."
Read the entire article at Chicago magazine.