INDUSTRY

GeneGo, Inc., a leading provider of software and databases for systems biology, today announced that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) have licensed MetaCore for "OMIC’s" research and reviewing of genomics data. GeneGo and the FDA will also integrate MetaCore with ArrayTrack and make it available for FDA researchers. The MetaCore platform allows scientists to concurrently visualize, map and network multiple types of data including gene expression, SiRNAi, proteomic, metabolomic, SAGE and SNP data, both from pre-clinical discovery and clinical studies. "High throughput (HT) experimentation is increasingly important for life science research, and HT data is now included in many new drug applications submissions. The analysis of such complex datasets requires novel systems biology tools, such as MetaCore™," said Dr Tatiana Nikolskaya, founder and CSO of GeneGo Inc. "One important issue in FDA submissions is compatibility and cross-referencing of multiple types of pre-clinical and clinical data, which are collected at different times by different research groups. MetaCore offers both a functional framework and analytical engine for this." "Working with the FDA is very important for GeneGo and we are very pleased to announce this relationship," said Julie Bryant, Vice President of Business Development at GeneGo. "Since MetaCore is already being applied in drug discovery by our pharmaceutical customers for a couple of years now, it is logical that it will be also used on the regulatory side as well." GeneGo has assembled the world largest manually curated database of human biology and medicinal chemistry, which includes genes, proteins, natural ligands, metabolites, drugs and diseasesfrom millions of literature findings.