GeneGo, Inc., a leading provider of databases, software and services in systems biology and chemistry, announced today that they were awarded with a Phase II SBIR grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for further development of an analytical platform for translational research and data analysis in oncology. NCI funding will support the industry and academia collaborative project MetaMiner (Oncology) run by GeneGo with investigators at Harvard Medical School, Johns Hopkins University, Tgen, Van Andel Institute and several global pharmaceutical companies. The MetaMiner platform combines disease reconstruction of multiple cancers, OMICs data repository and advanced statistical tools based on pathway descriptors.
"We are very pleased with NCI's decision to continue support for our MetaMiner(Oncology) platform, which is tailored for biologists, bench scientists, clinicians and medicinal chemists working in oncology," said Yuri Nikolsky, CEO of GeneGo and the grant's PI. "Over the last two years, we have created a general framework for disease reconstruction (causal disease models) and annotated many thousands of 'causative' links between genes, perturbed pathways and seven different cancers. We see target discovery, translational cancer research and personalized diagnostics as the top application areas for MetaMiner (Oncology)."
"There are many 'generic' pathway tools on the market, helpful to some extent in cancer data analysis. However, none of them is centered around cancer biology, which is essential," says Kornelia Polyak, an Associate Professor at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and a consultant on the grant. "Another focus is on the development of pathway-based tools for integration of different types of OMICs data – somatic mutations, high copy number genes, epigenetics, gene expression, proteomics and metabolomics."
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