BIOMEDICAL (BASIC) SBIR TOPIC 59, PHASE I, A CLOUD COMPUTING PLATFORM FOR CYTOMETRY

Flow cytometry is used throughout basic and clinical research efforts. The complexity and magnitude of the data generated, however, can be a barrier to data sharing, annotation, and bioinformatics analysis. Currently, this barrier limits the ability of researchers to make cytometry data available to the public and to fulfill NIH mandates for data distribution. In this contract, we will expand the capabilities of Cytobank, a web-based flow cytometry platform, and enable researchers to 1) create web-accessible reports of their experiments that links published figures with raw data, 2) annotate experiments with rich ontologies that place their work into searchable contexts, and 3) explore their data using advanced third party analysis algorithms written in statistical packages such as R. Achieving these goals will meet a critical need by developing and implementing a data sharing plan for researchers studying blood and related fields immunology, leukemia and lymphoma, autoimmunity, stem cells, which routinely rely on flow cytometry.