IDBS Launches Biomarker Discovery and Validation Solution to Accelerate Biomarker Research

IDBS announces the launch of the IDBS Biomarker Discovery and Validation Solution, which streamlines biomarker research and improves collaboration, intellectual property (IP) management and scientific understanding of complex disease, leading to new therapies.

The Biomarker Discovery and Validation Solution, based on the InforSense and E-WorkBook Suites, is the result of customer deployments with leading organizations such as Celera, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. The solution streamlines the speed and accuracy of biomarker research by enabling scientists to find, analyze and visualize complex phenotypic and genomic data. It provides multiple components supporting gene expression, genome wide association studies (GWAS) and proteomics techniques, which are packaged and deployed as web applications that guide scientists through quality control and analysis processes.

Biomarker ELN
Biomarker research is iterative, going from cohort selection and experimental QC and analysis through to qualification and validation, and incorporates many levels of decisions and multiple data points.

Currently, much of this important scientific knowledge and IP is dispersed across paper lab notebooks, spreadsheets and presentations, with only a small fraction being published or secured in a structured manner. Pharmaceutical companies and medical institutes need an Electronic Laboratory Notebook (ELN) to capture and manage their decision making and IP in biomarker research. By providing a central, secure, scalable and searchable biomarker ELN, organizations can improve their scientific productivity by ensuring experiments are not repeated, relevant data can be easily found and reports can be generated quickly.

Smart Search and Analysis - Data at Your Fingertips
The Biomarker Discovery and Validation Solution enables scientists to quickly find and display all the latest relevant project data in one simple interface. Data sources can include live internal experimental results and external data provided by Contract Research Organizations (CROs). Users can also upload their results and share them across multiple groups to improve data reuse.

Empowering Scientists
Using the solution, scientists can quickly and easily "slice-and-dice" clinical data to select subject cohorts and then move seamlessly into genomic quality control, analysis and integrated views. At each stage, users are guided through the required steps based on industry best practice, ensuring a consistent and repeatable approach to genomic analysis, all within an interactive web-based environment. Existing scripts, for example in R or PLINK, can be integrated into the environment, allowing the re-use of internal knowledge and capabilities. The IDBS solution also allows genes and proteins to be automatically annotated using public domain sources such as GenBank, UNI-PROT, GO and OMIM. It provides seamless integration to third party systems such as metabolic pathway databases, as well as integration with external literature sources such as PubMed.

"The Biomarker Discovery and Validation Solution demonstrates our commitment to the biomarker research market and is based on our extensive domain experience gained from working with our leading Pharma and Biotech customers," said Neil Kipling, founder and CEO of IDBS. "The combination of InforSense and E-WorkBook delivers a unique capability to the market, providing for the first time an ELN for genomic and biomarker research, protecting valuable IP, and making this knowledge searchable and reusable, even in a compliant environment."