Thermo Fisher and Genedata to accelerate metabolomics research
The collaboration will enable researchers to process and analyse the large volumes of mass spectral data needed to identify disease-state related metabolic and proteomic profiles faster and more confidently than ever before.
The largest application for the systems will be in the drug discovery process, looking for drug metabolites and the rate at which they are metabolised - a key indicator of the duration and intensity of a drugs pharmacological action.
"The combination of Genedata's Expressionist with Thermo Scientific's high-end hybrid mass spectrometers is going to allow researchers to acquire and interrogate data in ways they've never done before," said Iain Mylchreest, vice president of Life Science Mass Spectrometry (LSMS) at Thermo Scientific.
"They will be able to look at larger data sets and get specific answers about what happens in a biological system."
Genedata's Expressionist software package performs high-throughput data processing and automated quality analysis of mass spectral data, enabling researchers to simultaneously process and compare hundreds of samples.
This integrated data processing and statistical analysis approach helps researchers to understand the action of all the biological molecules in a sample while removing the need for them to spend hours pouring over individual spectra.
When combined with the high quality, high resolution mass spectral and accurate mass data generated by Thermo Scientific LTQ Orbitrap and LTQ-FT hybrid mass spectrometry systems the firms believe that component identification and cross-sample comparison can be conducted with a higher confidence than ever before.
According to Mylchreest, the scalable system offers an 'end-to-end' workflow that will enable researchers to ask the questions they want and view the results in the most appropriate manner for the specific experiment.
The increased data mining potential will also enable the discovery and validation of new disease biomarkers that have the potential to be used to help diagnose diseases at an earlier stage as well as for studying the efficacy of a drug intervention.
"We at Genedata are delighted at the opportunity to help scientists with the challenging process of biomarker discovery and development," said Dr Othmar Pfannes, CEO of Genedata.
"Genedata Expressionist enables the simultaneous analysis of large volumes of samples and massive amounts of data, in the hundreds of gigabytes range. The system is metabolomics-ready and scalable, efficiently managing both raw data and extracted peaks."
