Image analysis, said Pratt, may have initially been solely associated with photography, not cancer research.

During the project's infant days, Jurisica recalled the crystallization process was performed manually by humans using glass pipettes. But supercomputing has changed the picture with an injection of speed and accuracy.

"Without information technology, there is no way to interpret these results because machines are spitting out so much data every second, you must have enough capacity to store it and analyze and interpret the results."

"Biology can't really move forward without automation," he said.