By Allison Proffitt
July 14, 2008 | Thermo Fisher Scientific and Genedata have integrated Thermo’s mass spectrometry (MS) instrument with Genedata’s suite of software solutions to efficiently process and analyze large volumes of high-quality MS data.
Both companies will continue to sell and support their own products, but through a co-marketing agreement, Thermo and Genedata will offer customers both the mass spec instrumentation and the pre-processing and data analysis.
Mass spec presents a problem, Jens Hoefkens, Genedata’s managing director told Bio-IT World. It enables “customers to produce vast quantities of data that are hard to analyze… Genedata has been processing large quantities of data and developing data mining tools to make sense of those data for a number of years now. And that’s why we think this is a terrific fit for us to work together with Thermo.”
Thermo and Genedata believe that combining the Thermo Scientific MS systems with Genedata software solutions will enable researchers to enhance small-molecule biomarker detection with an "end-to-end" system that encompasses complete scientific workflows.
“If you think about this data when they come off the instrument, they do require some pre-processing,” says Hoefkens. “So you start out with hundreds of gigabytes of data you have to do background subtraction, noise removal, you have to correct for problems with alignment, things that are incidentally inherent in the technology. We do the pre-processing there, so we take the data off Thermo’s instruments, read their files, and process the data,”
The advantages for the customer are many, Hoefkens believes. “By working together, [Thermo and Genedata] exchange information behind the scenes so we get access to information about file format and changes, upcoming changes that enable us to make sure that the software will always be able to make use of the latest and greatest features in the instrument. At the same time we will of course be able to provide a much tighter integration, so there will be no need for the customer to copy files, transfer files, [or] reformat them so that they can be imported into a software system.”
Genedata’s software isn’t limited to pre-processing. The Expressionist software suite is modular and includes modules for data mining and data analysis. The advantage for customers, says Hoefkens, is “the ability to combine your metabolomics data from the Thermo instrument with, say for example, gene expression data from the Affymetrix platform, and having multiple data streams all ending up in a single data mining platform where you can then do cross omics integration and leverage the different insights you can get from different omics data streams to get more thorough understanding of the biology.”