Personalized Medicine, Powered by Clojure
Doug Selph at Clojure/conj 2013
Personalized Medicine has the potential to revolutionize therateutic medicine. The big idea is that your unique genetic traits could help guide decision making by the practitioners caring for you. In 2010, Vanderbilt University Medical Center launched PREDICT, a first-of-its-kind clinical genotyping program to genotype patients on both a just-in-time and prospective basis. The launch of PREDICT required the development of a new application to assist the clinical laboratory staff in managing the workflow of patient specimens through the genotyping process, and to allow them to enforce release/withhold decisions for the genotype results on each specimen following their QC protocols. This application when launched was built on a widely-used MVC web framework, but today is a Clojure system. We'll look at some of the pain points encountered with the MVC framework, how the introduction of Clojure into the application stack overcame a particular hurdle, the decision to proceed with a wholesale migration of the core application to Clojure, and how these moves have paid dividends in the lifecycle of the application.
Doug Selph has more than twenty years of experience in software development across a variety of industries. For the last twelve years he has been designing and implementing solutions supporting the work of genetic research and clinical care as part of the Computational Genomics Core at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, TN.
Doug Selph has more than twenty years of experience in software development across a variety of industries. For the last twelve years he has been designing and implementing solutions supporting the work of genetic research and clinical care as part of the Computational Genomics Core at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, TN.