The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has invested billions of dollars in space exploration. This investment has come back to Earth to benefit the medical community.
NASA's complex machine learning algorithms used to analyze the astrophysical similarities among galaxies such as NGC 3718 and NGC 3729 are now used for studying cancer.
The algorithms improve the extraction of patterns from complex data sets and help in the analysis of cancer.
NASA's involvement in cancer research is not new, though. The agency has been in partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH), allowing a portion of the space station for medical studies, including cancer research.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) collaborated with the City of Hope, a center for cancer research and treatment in California, to explore carbon nanotubes for the treatment of brain tumor. The laboratory also helped in the development of OmniCorder Technologies, Inc.'s The BioScan System, a technology that can locate cancerous lesions.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has played a big role in biomedical research for almost two decades. Last Sep. 6, JPL and the National Cancer Institute (NCI), which is part of NIH, renewed their research partnership through 2021. This extends the development of data science for the research on cancer.
"From a NASA standpoint, there are significant opportunities to develop new data science capabilities that can support both the mission of exploring space and cancer research using common methodological approaches," said Dan Crichton, head of JPL's Center for Data Science and Technology.
The technology will have a big impact on NCI's Early Detection Research Network (EDRN) as this will allow scientists to share data on cancer's chemical or genetic signatures or biomarkers.
With this technology, it will be easy for researchers and scientists to pool all their research data into a comprehensive network, giving them better chances of developing techniques to detect cancer at its earliest stage.
