Publish Date : 25-Apr-2013
Appistry, Inc., which provides a big-data computing environment that supports life-science and medical analytics and workflows, announced today a collaborative partnership and value-added reseller agreement with LifeMap Sciences, Inc., a subsidiary of BioTime, Inc. The intent of the partnership is to integrate LifeMap's GeneCards and MalaCards databases of human genes and diseases into the outputs produced by genomics pipelines running on Appistry's Ayrris computing environment. Appistry will market sequence analysis outputs and reports that include the GeneCards and MalaCards data to clinicians and researchers under a revenue share arrangement with LifeMap, based on sales of such reports.
Modern healthcare is increasingly dependent on genetic testing and molecular diagnostics, particularly as the costs associated with gene sequencing have dropped with the advent of next-generation sequencing (NGS) technologies. In fact, labs and hospitals cite analysis of NGS data as the primary bottleneck to leveraging genetic information to better diagnose disease, assess treatment options, and develop the targeted therapies that will enable personalized medicine.
"One of the biggest limitations on using next-generation sequencing in clinical settings is the ability to effectively translate raw sequence data into medically meaningful results," said Kevin Haar, CEO of Appistry. "To realize the promise of personalized medicine, organizations need to scale their bioinformatics pipelines to handle thousands of patient cases, while also providing information physicians can act on. Our partnership with LifeMap enables medical researchers to extend their analytic processes to deliver a better understanding of the biological pathways and disease states associated with genetic samples."
Appistry's Ayrris computing environment supports the rapid assembly of complex, data-intensive analytics that run a customer's choice of open-source, commercial, and proprietary tools at scale without requiring specialized expertise in high-performance computing or a complex software development effort. Under the partnership, Appistry will deliver access to data from LifeMap's GeneCards and Malacards databases within the pipeline results and personalized medicine reports provided by its Ayrris life science solutions and services. GeneCards, the human gene compendium, provides concise genomic information on all known and predicted human genes, including gene-disease associations, variants and single nucleotide polymorphisms, gene function and other fields of interest. MalaCards, the human disease database, contains information relating to a wide array of human diseases and the roles of genes in disease processes.
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