Developing Bioinformatics Tools for Proteomics Research

There continues to be a robust commercial market for innovative bioinformatics software to aid in the interpretation of proteomics and genomics data. Given an mRNA or protein expression experiment, researchers need to link the observed changes to inferences about phenomena upstream and downstream of the point in time that the experiment represents. Building on the successful Phase I prototype, we propose an enterprise software application that helps researchers predict what cellular and molecular events may have preceded a given expression profile, and what events may follow, including physiological changes, and pathological and clinical conditions. The application will be built on an integrated data warehouse of highly-respected, human-curated data sources in biology and medicine. A key feature will be a large network of pre-computed associations among facts from many different data sources. Customers will be able to edit these associations and add data from their own experiments. A sophisticated user interface will help the user navigate this network of facts to discover upstream and downstream phenomena related to their experimental results. Our product will address a large unmet need in industry, academic and government research organizations.