Energy Dept. helps with Biden’s cancer project

The Department of Energy (DOE) is hoping its supercomputers at national laboratories can be a key part of Vice President Joe Biden’s mission to find cancer therapies.

Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, who sits on the task force for Biden’s Cancer Moonshot, wrote in a blog post that DOE’s supercomputers are some of the most powerful in the world.

{mosads}“These exceptionally high-powered machines have the potential to greatly accelerate the development of cancer therapies by finding patterns in massive datasets too large for human analysis,” he wrote.

“Supercomputers can help us better understand the complexity of cancer development, identify novel and effective treatments, and help elucidate patterns in vast and complex data sets that advance our understanding of cancer.”

While the DOE supercomputer system’s main tasks revolve around energy research, it has a long history of helping with medical research, including playing a major role in mapping the human genome, Moniz said.

The first task for the supercomputers in the cancer project is analyzing patient records and genomic data, he said. DOE also might partner with private companies to help with their individual projects in the cancer program.