Qlucore has today announced that Dr Helena Carén has been using its Qlucore Omics Explorer to research tumour growth and treatment wh ilst at the Department of Clinical Genetics, Institute of Biomedicine, The Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden. The Sahlgrenska Academy is the faculty of health sciences at the University of Gothenburg, where education and research are conducted within the fields of pharmacy, medicine, odontology and health care sciences.
Dr Carén has been using the Qlucore software to analyse methylation data from the Illumina platform in order to identify patterns that could help to categorise tumours into different categories of seriousness, and also to predict how the tumour is likely to develop.
"It is often very difficult to find meaningful patterns in very large datasets like these, but Qlucore's software has made it much easier for me to understand the relevance of the data produced during my methylation analysis," says Helena Carén, PhD. "The 3D graphics, in particular, have been very helpful, since it is easier to spot important patterns when you can view your results as a 3D image, and even rotate the image, if needed, directly on the computer screen."
The ultimate goal of the methylation study is to identify a set of genes whose methylation profile can accurately determine how aggressive a tumour is, as well as the most effective method of treatment. In the longer term, these studies will also help to identify the specific genes that have contributed to formation of the tumour itself.
“Qlucore Omics Explorer has become a highly respected name in the bioinformatics market, and we are very proud to support such exciting work in this important area,” says Carl-Johan Ivarsson, President, Qlucore. "With so many biologists, researchers and scientists now using our software to study crucial areas like disease prevention, it is very rewarding to know that we are helping them to conduct more creative research and to achieve truly outstanding results."
Qlucore Omics Explorer allows the actual researchers – the people with the most biological insight – to study the data and to look for patterns and structures. In addition, because Qlucore Omics Explorer allows researchers to explore different hypotheses and alternative scenarios within seconds, the software is already helping to play a key role in unveiling important new discoveries.
“One of the best aspects of Qlucore Omics Explorer is that it has allowed me to manipulate all of my data myself, which means that it wasn't necessary to consult bioinformatics specialists every time I wanted to consider a new theory," Dr. Carén adds. "Plus, not only is it very easy for biologists to identify patterns in the data set very quickly by themselves, it is also easy to produce impressive charts and figures, which is very useful when presenting important findings for publication."
Qlucore started as a collaborative research project at Lund University, Sweden, supported by researchers at the Departments of Mathematics and Clinical Genetics, in order to address the vast amount of high-dimensional data generated with microarray gene expression analysis. As a result, it was recognised that an interactive scientific software tool was needed to conceptualise the ideas evolving from the research collaboration.
The basic concept behind the software is to provide a tool that can take full advantage of the most powerful pattern recogniser that exists - the human brain. The result is a core software engine that lets the user handle and filter data and the same time instantly visualise it in 3D. This will aid the user in identifying hidden structures and patterns. Over the last two years major efforts have been made to optimise the early ideas and to develop a core software engine that is extremely fast, allowing the user to explore and analyse high-dimensional data sets with the use of a normal PC, interactively and in real time.
Qlucore was founded in early 2007 and the first product released was the “Qlucore Gene Expression Explorer 1.0”. The latest version of this software, now called Qlucore Omics Explorer, represents a major step forward with advanced statistics support. All user action is at most two mouse clicks away. The company's early customers are mainly from the Life-science and Biotech industries, but solutions for other industries are currently under development.
One of the key methods used by Qlucore Omics Explorer to visualise data is dynamic principal component analysis (PCA), an innovative way of combining PCA analysis with immediate user interaction. PCA analysis works by projecting high dimensional data down to lower dimensions. The specific projections of the high-dimensional data are chosen in order to maintain as much variance as possible in the projected data set. With Qlucore Omics Explorer, data is projected and plotted on the two dimensional computer screen and then rotated manually or automatically.
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