Basel, 2004/12/01
University of Muenster's Integrated Functional Genomics (IFG) centre today announced the licensing of the Genedata Phylosopher system for biomarker characterization and in-depth pathway analysis in clinical research. This follows successful deployment of Genedata's expression profiling analysis platform, Genedata Expressionist, at IFG's centre, a Resource Center of the Interdisciplinary Center for Clinical Research (Interdisziplinäres Zentrum für Klinische Forschung; IZKF).
"Genedata Expressionist has proven to be fast and reliable and highly flexible at IFG's core facility for high throughput microarray experiments," says Prof. Dr. Clemens Sorg, Director of the IFG Muenster. Genedata Expressionist is predominantly used for screening patient and culture material for novel biomarkers and to investigate ways to optimize existing and develop novel therapeutic strategies from gene chip experiments. "With the Genedata Phylosopher system, we have now the opportunity to characterize functional aspects of identified biomarkers in basic medical research and in such diverse fields as cardiovascular disease, chronic inflammation, central nervous system disorders. When characterizing patient responses to alternative therapies, tight integration between expression profiles and the underlying molecular processes at the biochemical network level is an enormous advantage. Implementation of Genedata's advanced research IT system at IFG represents an important step towards further improving the high standards of the services we offer to our internal and external research partners. We already published the first papers in high ranking journals due to excellent bioinformatic standards."
"Dealing with the tremendous complexity of the eukaryotic cell requires a combination of up-to-date functional information and sophisticated tools for gene function prediction and pathway reconstruction. In addition an interspecies comparison of eukaryotic model organism like rat, mouse and human is an essential feature," says Dr. Kristina Riehemann, scientific coordinator at the IFG. "We have decided to work with Genedata's Expressionist and Phylosopher systems to bridge the gap between functional genomics and systems biology. The integrated platform enables in-depth analysis of the relationships between expression analysis and associated regulatory and metabolic pathways of various model organisms. Understanding this relationship is central to understanding the molecular processes underlying human disease."
"We are happy that IFG, a research institution with an excellent scientific reputation, have decided to base their clinical research processes on Genedata's platform," says Othmar Pfannes, PhD, CEO of Genedata. "The IFG-Genedata collaboration confirms yet again that the patient-centric workflows implemented in the Genedata Expressionist system, together with Genedata Phylosopher's high-quality annotation of the human genome represents a perfectly tailored infrastructure for clinical research processes."