System-Wide Pollution of Biomedical Data: Consequence of the Search for Hub Genes of Hepatocellular Carcinoma Without Spatiotemporal Consideration

Biomedical institutions rely on data evaluation and are turning into data factories. Big-data storage centers, supercomputing systems, and increased algorithmic efficiency allow us to analyze the ever-increasing amount of data generated every day in biomedical research centers. In network science, the principal intrinsic problem is how to integrate the data and information from different experiments on genes or proteins. Data curation is an essential process in annotating new functional data to known genes or proteins, undertaken by a biobank curator, which is then reflected in the calculated networks. We provide an example of how protein–protein networks today have space-time limits. The next step is the integration of data and information from different biobanks. Omics data and networks are essential parts of this step but also have flawed protocols and errors. Consider data from patients with cancer: from biopsy procedures to experimental tests, to archiving methods and computational algorithms, these are continuously handled so require critical and continuous “updates” to obtain reproducible, reliable, and correct results. We show, as a second example, how all this distorts studies in cellular hepatocellular carcinoma. It is not unlikely that these flawed data have been polluting biobanks for some time before stringent conditions for the veracity of data were implemented in Big data. Therefore, all this could contribute to errors in future medical decisions. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s40291-020-00505-3.