Basel, 2002/04/29

Genedata USA, the fully owned US subsidiary of the Swiss-based bioinformatics company Genedata AG, and the Stanford University School of Medicine have entered into a license agreement for the microarray data analysis system, Genedata Expressionist.

"The Genedata software will impact our process of deducing molecular mechanisms underlying the development of vascular disease. The ability of Genedata Expressionist to handle data from different microarray formats is critical for our analysis of the data emerging from parallel studies we are conducting in mouse and human. Also, the robust nature of the client/server-based system will allow us to store and analyze the large amount of information coming off our new 45,000 gene mouse chip" said Thomas Quertermous, MD, the William G. Irwin Professor, Chief of Stanford's Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, and Director, Donald W. Reynolds Cardiovascular Center for Clinical Research.

"We are extremely proud to have been selected by Stanford and are looking forward to the opportunity to interact with research groups there. This will enable Genedata to continue its development into the premier scientific bioinformatics company. We so much appreciate the opportunity to affiliate with an academic research facility of this caliber," adds Andrew DePristo, Ph.D., president of Genedata's US subsidiary. "Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer in the Western world. The advent of high-throughput expression profiling may help in the search for new therapeutics and preventatives if the massive amount of data can be controlled for quality and analyzed thoroughly. Genedata looks forward to collaborating in this important medical and scientific problem with Dr. Quertermous on the informatics and computational biology analysis."

Under terms of the agreement, the bioinformatics software system, Genedata Expressionist, will be used for quality control and statistical analysis of microarray data from research at Stanford into the molecular basis of arterial endothelial pathologies in both humans and mice. The capacity and organization of CoBi, Expressionist's (COre BIology) relational database, combined with Refiner, Expressionist's unique toolset for high-throughput quality control on microarray data, will allow Dr. Quertermous' lab to rapidly and reliably remove questionable data from the CoBi database prior to downstream analysis in the Analyst module. Quality assessment of data is critical to finding meaningful results in data mining. The system is set up as an institutional wide solution for the analysis of gene expression data, allowing Genedata Expressionist to form an integral component of the modern research process in which microarray data has become such an important factor.