What Happens When Life Sciences (Finally) Overcomes its Big Data Problem
Time to read: 10 mins
Life Sciences Has a (Big) Data Problem.
In life sciences, the headlines are often about breakthroughs at the bench. Yet the quiet revolution is happening in the server room, where data growth can be less glamorous but just as disruptive.
Data growth (especially too much data) is a symptom of enterprising businesses across modern life sciences. But when your data problem overwhelms your IT, what happens next?
In a life sciences setting, arriving at medical breakthroughs, speed and accuracy are everything. The life sciences sector – including pharmaceuticals, biotechnology, and genomics – has always relied on data.
In recent years, data growth has eclipsed what the industry dealt with just a decade ago. Sequencing technologies, clinical trials, imaging, and digital health platforms can often generate more data than what has been conventionally managed. A large volume of data that is raw, unprocessed, and out of control is not so useful. But if you introduce the right technologies, such as data cataloguing, you can transform data into information, making it organised and relevant.
This explosion in data brings opportunity. A wider sprawl of data points to reference creates more chances to identify trends and patterns, test theories, and accelerate innovation.
But data growth also has its headaches: how do organisations turn oceans of raw data into actionable insights quickly enough to make a difference in people’s lives?
For many, the answer lies in high-performance computing (HPC).
Turn Data Deluge into Discovery
The global healthcare and life sciences industry is on the front line of some of humanity’s toughest challenges: cancer treatment, vaccine development, and rare disease research. Data is the common link, bringing to the forefront exciting research, new cures, and potentially life-improving pharmaceutical products. In genomics, for example, sequencing a single human genome can generate over 200 gigabytes of raw data. Multiply that by thousands of patients in clinical trials, and the complexity becomes overwhelming. Managing data of this scale is where technology becomes a major brushstroke in the overall picture of genomics research and the future of patient care.
Traditional IT infrastructures won’t cope with this demand. Data sprawl, where the growth of information over time overwhelms how its managed, is a risk we all face as research becomes more complicated. Conventional storage products will be able to store larger data volumes, but they will lack the speed and capability to process it in a meaningful timeframe. What can happen, as our experts have seen, is a widening of the gap between data as its captured and stored, and the potential insights it holds. When you have the technology to make data actionable, insightful and manageable, there’s a larger platform for promising discovery in the field.
HPC enables researchers to shorten the path from lab research to real-life impact.
A different take
Through the Lens of Clinical Impact
In the field of research, speed is a critical capability – delivered by HPC platforms. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a dramatic case study in support of this. Developing effective vaccines in record time required not only unprecedented scientific collaboration but also the ability to model proteins, run simulations, and test hypotheses at scale. HPC resources (such as those projects listed on the COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium), combined with an ecosystem of other technologies, gave researchers the horsepower to accelerate that process from years to months.
This lesson is not lost on the broader life sciences industry. In areas such as oncology, precision medicine, and drug repurposing, speed isn’t just a competitive advantage – it’s a moral imperative. When data is manageable it can more easily be mobilised, meaning:
- research projects reach real-world clinical settings faster
- clinical trials can be optimised
- regulators get the data points they need to approve medicines safely
- ultimately, treatments reach patients sooner
But the race isn’t against data – it’s against subjects like disease progression, new and effective patient pathways, and ultimately health outcomes. Innovating towards faster insights from a wider, more sprawling data group has its benefits in reaching quicker time-to-patient results.
The stories of COVID-19 as a clinical success proved that acceleration in research isn’t simply academic; it changed how we approach public health. HPC technologies plays a role in collapsing the timeline between discovery and treatment. Nowadays, oncology teams, rare disease researchers, and precision medicine innovators are benchmarking technologies on how quickly insights reach clinics, a regulator’s office, or a patient’s treatment plan.
The Role of Data Cataloguing
In HPC, compute alone isn’t the whole story.
For HPC to deliver results, organisations need to know their data – where it is, how it’s structured, and whether it’s compliant with regulation. That’s where data cataloguing platforms such as IBM Fusion play a pivotal role.
By cataloguing and governing data, life sciences firms can ensure researchers spend less time searching for datasets and more time analysing them. Just as importantly, catalogues help address compliance requirements, which remain especially stringent in healthcare. The combination of catalogued, trustworthy data and HPC’s processing power makes it possible to generate insights at speed, without compromising on quality or safety.
EXCLUSIVE TO CSI
How Well Do You Know Your Data?
Imagine unboxing a new mobile phone and deciding, as it has all the modern features, that it will replace your camera. After years of use, your photo library will be dense with memories, photos of locations, holidays, family, friends and more. The trouble with this large library of data is locating the exact photos you want, quickly, and repeatedly. Applied to clinical settings, and potentially life-saving research, knowing your data could change everything.
After taking the CSI demo labs on tour at Festival of Genomics (2025) and Genomics England Research Summit (2025), we started to ask those in attendance: how well do you know your data?
Data cataloguing can make all the difference, enabling better hygiene and practice around how data gets used and navigated in clinical research projects. As a market-leader in HPC and with access to our IBM Fusion platform, CSI is working with life sciences’ professionals to help them understand their data better.
A Platform for Big Data
The global pandemic served as an arresting reminder that accelerated discovery of safe medicines in aid of health goals is an urgent priority. The pandemic unfolded many other lessons; among them how quickly new threats can emerge and overwhelm our current medical infrastructure.
HPC serves as a foundation for healthcare innovation. With disciplined data management, companies can transform the way they approach research and development. Instead of waiting weeks for analysis, timeframes become condensed, and the path to insight and discovery is clearer and briefer.
Here’s Why We’re Excited About IBM Fusion (In 30 Seconds or Less)
If issues like data sprawl and goals such as accelerated discovery are on the agenda, then you will need a hybrid cloud data platform. IBM Fusion (or what you might call ‘AI in-a-box’) has emerged as the market leader in data integration and cataloguing.
IBM Fusion enables researchers to unify vast, disparate datasets into a single, accessible framework. For industries like pharma and bioinformatics – where speed to insight is game changing – this means fewer silos, faster collaboration, and more reliable outcomes. By combining governance with scalability, IBM Fusion doesn’t just manage data, it transforms it into a strategic asset that fuels innovation.
Test Drive IBM Fusion
CSI’s Demo Labs simplifies complex IT solutions by allowing you to trial the HPC solutions that have the most impact on achieving your business goals.
Our HPC services and solutions are easy to use, designed with market-leading technologies, and cost-efficient, so your organisation can build a powerful platform for HPC workloads that delivers the performance, speed and operational resilience you demand.
Heard enough? Book a demo today and let’s test drive what could be the answer to your data problems and needs.
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