St. Jude online system offers info about cancer and genes

St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital has launched a big new computer system to help researchers study genetic links to childhood cancer.

The hospital says the new system, called St. Jude Cloud, will help researchers around the world find cures much more quickly.

Each person in the world has a unique gene sequence. The creators of St. Jude Cloud have uploaded the complete gene sequences of more than 5,000 people who now have childhood cancers or who have survived these cancers.

Scientists can now log into this system securely and run their own studies about the information.

They can start studying the data online, or “in the cloud,” without having to download it all to a local computer. Human genomes are very large, so avoiding downloads will save a lot of time, the hospital said.

In a blog post, a researcher described a download that took nine months.

“St. Jude Cloud is a powerful resource to drive global research and discovery forward,” Jinghui Zhang said in a statement. She’s chair of the St. Jude Department of Computational Biology and co-leader of the St. Jude Cloud project.

On Sunday, St. Jude researcher Scott Newman will give a talk at a cancer research conference in Chicago about how he used St. Jude Cloud to do a study related to leukemia, a blood cancer.

The hospital says within a few days, Newman was able to use the system to corroborate experimental findings that had originally taken a research team more than two years to make.

The new computer system was developed as a partnership among St. Jude along with software companies Microsoft and DNAnexus.

The web site for the new cloud system is at stjude.cloud. The site is password-protected and scientists who enter the site have to go through a vetting process.

The hospital plans to add more patients’ genetic data to the computer system over time.

Reach reporter Daniel Connolly at 529-5296, daniel.connolly@commercialappeal.com, or on Twitter at @danielconnolly.