Evotec Releases SaaS Pan-Omic Data Analysis Platform

By Allison Proffitt 

October 20, 2022 | BERLIN—At the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo Europe yesterday, Evotec SE launched the first commercial version of its PanOmics data analysis platform PanHunter. PanHunter is Evotec’s PanOmics data access and analytics platform and was developed and used successfully internally and in industry-shaping drug discovery partnerships over many years. Evotec now makes PanHunter available to collaborators and partners as a software-as-a-service (“SaaS”) product. 

PanHunter was a finalist in the Bio-IT World Best of Show new products awards program.  

“Pan-omics datasets, they are really hard to handle for a non-coding person,” Carla Tameling, head of sales and applications for Evotec, told Bio-IT World on a bustling Expo floor in Berlin. “You always have a very big gap between the project scientists and the bioinformaticians, computational biologists who are able to code and handle the data. To cover this bridge, we thought it was a good idea to make it open.”  

PanHunter originates from Evotec’s commitment towards patient-centric, pan-omics-driven drug discovery. The amount of available ’omics data is growing at exponential rates in the public domain and in the pharmaceutical industry. More ’omics data has been generated in the last two years than in all previous years combined, the company says, and these data hold an overwhelming amount of information about the condition of the respective patients, the molecular biological context, and causes of diseases. To extract such insights and new knowledge from data, it is paramount to use the smartest and easiest-to-use analytical tools and make them available to all scientists across disciplines. 

PanHunter is unique in its ability to integrate the analysis of pan-omics data, designed as an easy-to-use yet fully comprehensive data analysis platform. It supports, for instance, the stratification of patient populations via molecular mechanisms and the prediction of efficacy and toxicity profiles of drug candidates given appropriate data inputs.  

The software runs in the browser, and is very easy to access, Tameling said. She also highlighted how interactive it is. “We think this is important because what we have seen—what our scientists and bioinformatics have seen—there are a lot of pipeline tools available. You have your pipeline, you put something in the beginning, you get something out at the end. Then you figure out, ugh. That’s not right, so you need to redo the whole thing.”  

That was not the experience Evotec wanted to offer. “We wanted it to be completely exploratory; you’re not bound to pre-defined routes,” she said.  

With the launch of the first commercial version of the software at Bio-IT World Europe, Evotec makes PanHunter available to interested partners to accelerate their data-driven research. 

“We figured out it was so valuable for our internal researchers,” Tameling said. “It really shortens down the loop between bioinformatics and project scientists.”