Interview- Ramesh Hariharan, CTO and Founder at Strand Life Sciences

Analytics India Magazine: Can you tell us more about genomic measurement and Big Data Challenges in Personalized Medicine? Ramesh Hariharan: We are at the threshold of a major revolution in health care: thanks to two decades of explosive research in tools and techniques that interrogate living cells at the molecular level, doctors will soon have an invaluable tool added to their arsenal to help diagnose and cure disease, i.e., the genome of the patient. Several success stories have already emerged, for instance, a little boy who needed several futile operations before sequencing his genome indicated a defect in the immune system, which was then solved with a blood transplant. The genome and its associated paraphernalia are quite large and that naturally calls for Big Data techniques to manage and deliver genomic information to clinicians, consumers, and researchers. To just give you a feel, sequencing machines generate upwards of 150GB of compressed data for a single individual and a