Can Big Data cure Cancer?

As the cost and throughput of genomic technologies reach a point where DNA sequencing is close to becoming a routine exam at the clinics, there is a lot of hope that treatments of diseases like cancer can dramatically improve by a digital revolution in medicine, where smart algorithms analyze « big medical data » to help doctors take the best decisions for each patient or to suggest new directions for drug development. While artificial intelligence and machine learning-based algorithms have indeed had a great impact on many data-rich fields, their application on genomic data raises numerous computational and mathematical challenges that I will illustrate on a few examples of patient stratification or drug response prediction from genomic data.