Agilent Technologies Inc., (NYSE: A) and Strand Life Sciences today
introduced Agilent GeneSpring GX 10.0, the next generation of
Agilent’s flagship microarray bioinformatics platform. GeneSpring
GX now offers tools for systems-level data interpretation and pathway
analysis, enabling scientists to attain a new level of insight into the
underlying mechanism of disease or biological process.
Agilent signed an agreement with Strand in August 2007 to develop
upgrades to GeneSpring, considered the gold standard of desktop gene
expression analysis, on avadis – Strand’s award-winning
data analysis platform. Strand previously had a similar relationship
with Stratagene, which Agilent acquired in June 2007. Agilent decided
to switch its own in-house GeneSpring development efforts to Strand two
months later, and GeneSpring GX 10.0 is a result of this collaboration.
“We saw how productive Strand‘s collaboration with
Stratagene was, and saw the benefits of developing GeneSpring in a
similar way,” said Sanjeev Dhar, Country Sales Head – LSCA,
Agilent Technologies India. “This edition of GeneSpring GX
addresses the growth of systems-level studies in functional genomics
research. GeneSpring has always been excellent at gene expression data
analysis. Now, it has evolved into an integrated software package that
helps scientists discover the relationship between the data and the
biological events occurring in their samples.”
“GeneSpring GX 10.0 represents the first step toward an analytics
standard in systems biology,” said Dr. Vijay Chandru, Chairman
and CEO of Strand. “Very few development groups in the world
could take on such a challenge involving both depth and breadth of
knowledge in research biology. The enormity of the challenge was
acceptable because of the pre-eminent reputation of the GeneSpring
platform, the architecture of the extensible avadis platform and a
superb inter-disciplinary development team. We believe that GeneSpring
GX 10.0 represents a qualitative change in research biology informatics
and are confident it will delight GeneSpring users.”
Beyond Gene Expression
GeneSpring GX has earned a solid reputation among gene-expression
biologists, with more than 4,400 references in Google Scholar,
including more than 1,600 in peer-reviewed publications. As
systems-level studies become more prevalent in genomics research,
GeneSpring GX 10.0 adds visualization and analysis tools for
applications including alternative splicing, miRNA expression and
real-time PCR. To get more insight into the underlying mechanism of
disease, GeneSpring now has powerful pathway analysis capabilities. By
providing a database of gene product interactions, scientists can build
biological interaction networks from their genes of interest.
GeneSpring also provides statistical tools to detect significant
changes in miRNA abundance, and integrates TargetScan miRNA gene-target
information to determine the biological consequences of detected
changes. Additionally, to facilitate validation of microarray
experiments, GeneSpring GX 10.0 supports analysis of real-time PCR
data.
Enterprise Solution for Systems-Level Research
To support enterprise functional genomics data-analysis needs, Agilent
offers GeneSpring Workgroup, a client-server application with
GeneSpring GX as the data-analysis engine providing central and secure
storage for GeneSpring data and analysis results.
“Genespring Workgroup has the flexibility to act as an enterprise
‘omics’ data warehouse while also allowing developers to
build additional functionality using the extensive APIs,” said
Ketan Patel, Ph.D., associate research fellow, Computational Sciences,
Pfizer Inc., an early-access user of GeneSpring GX 10.0. “This is
the main reason why we favored this product, as it allows us to
integrate the system with our existing databases and tools and also
build out new functionality using scripting in languages such as R,
Java and Python. The APIs allow us to extensively search the database
using sample annotation attributes. This was very important to us and
will enable broader use of omics data within the enterprise.”
“This type of collaboration cannot be quickly turned on and off,
because it demands a high level of trust. The products and end user
needs are highly complex,” Sanjeev Dhar observes.
“We’ve been working with leading Indian IT companies for
more than 15 years, and this GeneSpring launch is just the latest of
Agilent’s long track record of in-country teamwork.”
About Strand Life Sciences Pvt. Ltd.
Strand Life Sciences -- Strand -- is a premier life science informatics
innovation company. Strand leverages its core strengths and
intellectual property in data mining, predictive modeling,
bioinformatics and computational chemistry to develop products and
solutions for drug discovery. Strand’s products are built on the
award-winning platform avadis. More information about Strand is
available on the Web at www.strandls.com.
About Agilent Technologies
Agilent Technologies Inc. (NYSE: A) is the world’s premier
measurement company and a technology leader in communications,
electronics, life sciences and chemical analysis. The company’s
19,000 employees serve customers in more than 110 countries. Agilent
had net revenues of $5.4 billion in fiscal 2007. Information about
Agilent is available on the Web at www.agilent.com.
Agilent in India has approximately 1800 professionals engaged in a wide
range of high value added activities that include cutting edge research
and development work, Engineering & IT services, global business
support and financial services for the global operations of the
company. Agilent has offices in Gurgaon, Chandigarh, Bangalore, Mumbai,
Ahmedabad, Chennai and Hyderabad.
NOTE TO EDITORS: Further technology, corporate citizenship and
executive news is available on the Agilent news site at
www.agilent.com/go/news.
EDITORIAL CONTACTS:
Contact Strand Life Sciences -
Radhika Choudary,
Director (Corporate Affairs)
India Office - Tel: +91-80-2361-8992
E-mail: radhika@strandls.com
