Decision to integrate

SOMERVILLE, Mass.—Respondingto the requests of mutual customers who use Spotfire's visual data analysissoftware DecisionSite and GeneGo's genomic, proteomic and pharmacology dataanalysis tools MetaCore and MetaDrug, the two companies announced they recentlycompleted an integration of the two companies' products.

By integrating the products, officials at both companies saythe results provide researchers with a tool that will save time in thelaboratory and allow for more insights to be drawn from experimental data.

"The combination of DecisionSite and MetaCore and MetaDrugallows researchers to bring data from those products together with otherexperimental data from assays including biological action, chemical structures,properties and activity," says Christian Marcazzo, senior director of lifescience analytics with Spotfire. "The final evaluation of any experimentalresults means the combination of lots of biological information with the rawexperimental data. Tools like GeneGo really provide a lot of biological contextto let the scientists look at their RNAi screening experiments, for example."

For GeneGo, making the integration was a two-month processand is available to current users as an upgrade to their existing MetaCore andMetaDrug software. Providing the ability for data generated by its products tobe brought into the DecisionSite platform only makes sense, as more and moreresearchers are looking to gain valuable insight by combining both biologicaland chemistry data, notes Julie Bryant, VP of business development at GeneGo.

"Spotfire has a lot of statistical analysis andvisualization tools for general data that our products don't have," Bryantsays. "Whereas we're focused on systems biology, pathway analysis, systemspharmacology, biological information, interaction and that makes them a goodfit."

The project was pushed by common customers of both companieswho wanted to use the tools seamlessly. "Before the integration, you could lookat the different types of data in isolation and you could do a statisticalanalysis to try to find out what is important," says Bryant. "But if you doreally stringent filtering statistically, you may lose something that is reallyimportant biologically. So by using DecisionSite with MetaCore and MetaDrug, youbring it into a biological environment in the context of what is known in theliterature and that provides a true picture, a visual context, which makes iteasier to see things than you'd be able to do mathematically and statisticallywith spreadsheets."

That visualization capability and the ability ofDecisionSite to function across a wide slice of the discovery continuum, withan open platform, and allows the integrations of wide range of analysis toolsis exactly what Spotfire aims to provide. "We try to keepour technology rather horizontal and independent of the domain specificcapabilities and we work with our partners and customers to build that in tosupport their workflow," says Marcazzo. "We don't believe in reinventing thewheel, providing something that may have been built very well by someone else."