Transcriptomics Biomarker Capabilities Advances Drug Development for Personalized Medicine

Newly designed transcriptomics-based biomarker discovery expressionist modules provide expanded drug development processing and reporting functionalities.

Genedata (Basel, Switzerland), a provider of in silico solutions for pharmaceutical R&D and related life sciences, announced the release of Genedata Expressionist 5.3 with enhanced capabilities for transcriptomics-based biomarker discovery for applications in drug profiling and patient selection.

"Expressionist can analyze large amounts of data with highly sophisticated statistical features, not only to visualize your data but also to preprocess them, perform classical statistical analysis, and very high-end classification and prediction,” said Dr. Sergio Baranzini, associate professor in the department of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco (USA). Dr. Baranzini's team is part of an academic research consortium studying the genetics of multiple sclerosis. "We tested the breadth of software possibilities and Genedata Expressionist goes beyond the capabilities of most software I've ever worked with,” continued Dr. Baranzini. "Expressionist's intuitive nature eliminates the trial-and-error process that usually can't be avoided when working with analytical software.”

Expressionist 5.3 expands the process capabilities of its Refiner Array module to support the next generation of microarrays, including Affymetrix (Santa Clara, CA, USA) Whole-Transcript and Exon arrays. In response to the growing importance of customized arrays, flexibility in preprocessing raw data has been increased by incorporating array type-specific layout information. Furthermore, data quality-assessment functionality as well as access to biological information has been significantly enhanced. To support automated workflow-based standard operating procedures (SOPs) for applications in personalized medicine, a completely new reporting engine has been developed. Processing performance has also been optimized to enable efficient analysis of large-scale microarray projects.

"The release of Expressionist 5.3 is another major step in supporting high-performance data processing and accurate data analysis of the large-scale microarray projects that are becoming standard in drug discovery and related life-science applications,” noted Dr. Othmar Pfannes, CEO of Genedata.

Recent Expressionist releases have already augmented technology support in transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics as well as enabled high-end cross-omics data processing for mass spectrometry and transcriptomics data. "Genedata is committed to supporting novel technologies and providing innovative solutions to meet the needs of our users and the demands of constantly evolving technologies,” continued Dr. Pfannes. "As an independent company with a proven track record of delivering best-in-class services to customers around the world, we look forward to collaborating with our partners to improve the efficiency of drug discovery and development in the life sciences.”

Genedata develops and globally markets sophisticated computational solutions for drug discovery and related research processes in the life sciences. Genedata's solutions enable scientists to process, integrate, analyze, and manage large and complex experimental data sets generated by high throughput technologies. Solutions include Genedata Phylosopher for target discovery and integrative biological data management, Genedata Screener for automated high throughput screening and high content screening, and Genedata Expressionist for biomarker discovery and personalized medicine.

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