Something for more refined tastes

By Jeffrey BouleyBASEL, Switzerland—Genedata, a provider of in silico solutions for the pharmaceutical and life sciences industries, in mid February announced a deal with fellow Swiss company Roche for the Genedata Expressionist Refiner MS module.

As an integral part of the Genedata Expressionist platform for biomarker discovery, Refiner MS performs automated quality assessment and preprocessing of mass spectrometry based proteomics and metabolomics data. The module reportedly handles all MS data formats in a flexible high throughput process, providing real-time interactive data QA and processing hundreds of chromatograms simultaneously.

It was precisely this dual benefit of high flexibility and high throughput that Roche was looking for in its biomarker discovery and diagnostic strategy—and Genedata CEO Dr. Othmar Pfannes notes that "The successful positioning of Refiner MS in such a complex, multifaceted environment validates its excellent suitability for modern proteomics applications."

"Thanks to its open architecture, Refiner MS can be easily positioned in our lab workflows, allowing for optimal integration. The high performance qualities make it a key element in our proteomics process, for which the processing of large datasets is fundamental," says Dr. Hanno Langen, Section Head Proteomics-Pathways-Functional Genomics in the Roche Molecular Medicine Laboratories in Basel.

Genedata received similar accolades recently from the Fiehn Laboratory at University of California, Davis, which late last year singed up with Genedata for use of the Refiner MS and Analyst Software for biomarker discovery.

"Given our extensive work with infusion MS and LC-MS, Genedata's ability to work concurrently with both the raw data and extracted peaks will greatly facilitate our research," says Dr. Oliver Fiehn, associate professor at the UC Davis Genome Center. "There are other systems available to handle portions of our workflow, but Genedata is unique in their capability to handle the breadth of our research processes. Their ability to handle hundreds of samples and hundreds of gigabytes of data simultaneously combined with the support for all of the MS hardware providers and MS setups made Genedata the obvious choice for us."

Other high-profile placements of the Expressionist technology platform have occurred recently at Eisai Research Institute in Andover, Mass., and Center for Toxicoinformatics at the FDA.