REDWOOD CITY, Calif.—Ingenuity Systems and Inpharmatica Ltd. of London have decided to bring their respective customers the benefit of two distinctly different products by offering the ability to use in tandem their Blu-Chip and Ingenuity Pathway Analysis (IPA) offerings.
Reportedly, this tandem product solution will be a major benefit to researchers working with Affymetrix GeneChips by allowing them to access "world-class knowledge bases that cover all aspects of research from initial probe assignment to details of the protein network," according to an official release from the companies.
"The rationale was quite simple," says Sreeni Devidas, vice president of business development for Ingenuity. "Affymetrix GeneChips can have problems mapping to the right proteins. Our thought when we first explored this collaboration was, 'Can we use Blu-Chip to do better protein mapping for IDs that come from the Affymetrix chips?'"
Blu-Chip is Inpharmatica's probe-to-protein assignment module, which Devidas says "maximizes the value of GeneChip experiments, giving researchers a resource for resolving probe-to-protein assignments and access to a database of preferred assignment and alternative assignments as well."
Inpharmatica touts an "intuitive" interface in its product that enables users to more easily resolve ambiguities in their GeneChip experiments and make better judgments about assignments. Blu-Chip is particularly effective at distinguishing splice variants and isoforms, as well as providing clear indications of intronic location, according to John Lisle, CEO of Inpharmatica.
IPA brings significant informatics firepower to the technology team-up, Devidas says, offering a Web-based software application that enables researchers to model, analyze and understand the complex biological systems studied in life science research. He adds that it supports analysis of all high-throughput platforms and is used in virtually all areas of drug discovery and development.
"It handles analysis from target identification and validation all the way to biomarkers, predictive toxicology and pharmacogenomics," Devidas notes.
"Ingenuity's IPA software has garnered favorable opinions throughout the research community," Lisle says, noting that this is his company's first collaboration of this kind. "We believe that it will enables researchers to move seamlessly through two key steps of analysis—probe assignment and protein network analysis—thus simplifying workflows and accelerating discoveries."
The deal is a new breed of collaboration for Ingenuity as well, Devidas says. The company has made other deals recently, such as a partnership forged in April with Asuragen to provide IPA to Asuragen's molecular diagnostic customers and a January arrangement with Rosetta Biosoftware to establish interoperability between the Rosetta Resolver system and IPA. But the deal with Inpharmatica is unique because it brings together two such distinct independently created products that perform such different functions.
Tuan Nguyen, vice president of partner and professional services for Ingenuity, calls the deal a win-win scenario not just for the two companies but their customers as well.
"Inpharmatica is an established player in the field of drug discovery technologies and services and…the synergy provided by offering Blu-Chip and IPA together will bring benefits to our users in the research community and to the two companies themselves."
