Monday, 29 November 2010

Management and analysis of mass spectrometry data

Integromics, a leader in IT solutions provision for life sciences in the field of genomics and proteomics, today announces that the Princeton Mass Spectrometry Center has purchased a license for the Integromics’ OmicsHub Proteomics solution.

The Princeton University Center will use OmicsHub as a key element in its strategy for data management and analysis of mass spectrometry (MS) data. Integromics will deploy the solution at Princeton and create a functional data analysis infrastructure by the end of 2010.

For a rapidly growing MS center like at Princeton, tracking, administering, analyzing, and performing large numbers of IT tasks on huge amounts of MS data is a vast undertaking that can become prohibitively elaborate. These activities quickly become a bottleneck to research, limiting the speed or the depth of data analysis that can be performed routinely. OmicsHub will help it continually engage in large numbers of collaborative MS projects of increasing complexity.

Currently in the MS marketplace there are separate solutions for both data management and data analysis. OmicsHub provides a global solution that integrates both MS data management and data analysis into a single platform. This streamlines the data analysis workflow, increasing efficiency and productivity, saving time and money, and facilitating collaboration between scientists.

“As we move to become one of the preeminent scientific collaborative research centers for Mass Spectrometry and Systems Biology, the amount of data that we produce, analyze, and manage is daunting. We believe that Integromics’ comprehensive OmicsHub solution will play a critical role in our successful strategy to address this and establish an efficient infrastructure necessary for large-scale projects and systems-wide informatics,” said Dr. David Perlman, Director of the Princeton Mass Spectrometry Center.

“The Princeton Mass Spectrometry Center decision to use the OmicsHub solution is a significant step towards the expansion of Integromics from the genomics to the proteomics data management field,” said Dr. Michael J. McManus, CEO, Integromics. “The high caliber faculty of Princeton University is world-renowned for cutting edge-research. As a result, Integromics is excited to have its products used by the MS facility.”

OmicsHub was developed by Integromics as a result of a collaboration with the Spanish National Institute for Proteomics (ProteoRed) and the Proteome Xchange. The comprehensive data management tool allows the user to collect, annotate and conduct qualitative and quantitative analysis of mass spectrometry data.

Mass spectrometry is an analytical technique used to measure the mass of molecules. It is heavily used in contemporary pharmaceutical and life-science research to characterize synthetic molecules, such as drugs and other chemicals, and naturally formed biomolecules, such as metabolites, peptides, and proteins. Through measuring their mass and the mass of their fragments, scientists are able to deduce the exact chemical composition and structure of these molecules. Applications are wide-ranging, from the identification of unknown compounds to the characterization of molecular-level differences between normal and disease states in complex biological systems.

Integromics SL