Nic Crane

Nic Crane | The future’s Shiny: Pioneering genomic medicine in R | Posit (2019)

Shiny’s expanding capabilities are rapidly transforming how it is used in an enterprise. This talk details the creation of a large-scale application, supporting hundreds of concurrent users, making use of the future and promises packages. The 100,000 genomes project is an ambitious exercise that follows on from the Human Genome Project - aiming to put the UK at the forefront of genomic medicine, with the NHS as the first health service in the world to offer precision medicine to patients with rare diseases and cancer. Data is at the heart of this project; not only the outputs of the genomic sequencing, but vast amounts of metadata used to track progress against the 100,000 genome target and the status and path of each case through the sample tracking pipeline. In order to make this data readily available to stakeholders, Shiny was used to create an application containing multiple interactive dashboards. A scaled-up version of the app is being rolled out in early 2019 to a much larger audience to support the National Genomics Informatics Service, with the challenge of creating a complex app capable of supporting so many users without grinding to a halt. In this talk, I will explain why Shiny was the obvious technology choice for this task, and discuss the design decisions which enabled this project’s success.