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Ever since the coining of the term big data, people have been hailing it as an asset of potentially immeasurable value to businesses and to medical science. But to master it, we need to master the patterns that data contains.

A new firm claims to have done just that, with software that doesn't just recognise patterns in data, it discovers patterns we weren't even looking for. Tech entrepreneur Mark Anderson has pioneered pattern discovery technology, which has many uses, such as working out which gene combinations are causing a disease. He says it would it would take today's supercomputers centuries to do calculations at the same level as his pattern computer.

Professor Ben Brown is chair of environmental bioinformatics at Birmingham University. He has used the technology for a pilot study on breast cancer treatment. His research identified three genes which interact together in a complicated way, which was previously impossible.

But Teppo Felin, professor of strategy at Oxford's Said Business School, says we still need a human to assess the quality and usefulness of data.

Producer: Laurence Knight

(Picture: a blue digital computer brain on a circuit board. Credit: Getty)