Would you trust Google with your genetic data? Firm reveals storage service for $25 per person in bid to boost personalised medicine and drug discovery

Google already offers storage for your emails, photos and documents.

Now, it wants to take things a step further - and store your genetic information online.

The firm hopes its Google Genome project will lead to personalised drugs -and will charge just £25 per person to store data on its servers.

It hopes the service will be popular with hospitals, drug firms and researchers will use the service, taking advantage of Google's vast servers to compare information and find the cause of disease.

'We saw biologists moving from studying one genome at a time to studying millions,' David Glazer, the software engineer who led the effort and was previously head of platform engineering for Google+, the social network, told Technology Review.

'The opportunity is how to apply breakthroughs in data technology to help with this transition.'

The goal of the system, Google says, is to 'explore genetic variation interactively.' 

'Use Google's infrastructure and big data expertise,' it said. 

'Store one genome or a million using Google Genomics and take advantage of the same infrastructure that powers Search, Maps, YouTube, Gmail and Drive.'

This means allowing researchers to access millions of genomes and run batch analyses, easily. 

The National Cancer Institute said last month that it would pay $19 million to move copies of the 2.6 petabyte Cancer Genome Atlas into the cloud. 

The National Cancer Institute said last month that it would pay $19 million to move copies of the 2.6 petabyte Cancer Genome Atlas into the cloud.

Copies of the data, from several thousand cancer patients, will reside both at Google Genomics and in Amazon’s data centers.

Doctors also say the move coule lead to more personalised medicines. 

'Our bird's eye view is that if I were to get lung cancer in the future, doctors are going to sequence my genome and my tumor's genome, and then query them against a database of 50 million other genomes,' said Deniz Kural, whose company, Seven Bridges, stores genome data with Amazon's cloud system. 

'The result will be 'Hey, here's the drug that will work best for you.' '

Source: Dailymail