Fleshing out genomic data

Capturing value from genomic information is easier said than done, and bridging the gap between expression profiling and tissue analysis and/or disease diagnosis is an area of intense focus. Last week, Informax Inc. and TissueInformatics Inc. agreed to develop an automated platform linking tissue analysis with genomic data.

While expression profiling can be done in an efficient quantitative manner, the ultimate usefulness of the analysis depends on the starting material. To side-step the qualitative and time-consuming process of tissue analysis by a pathologist, TissueInformatics provides automated high resolution images of tissue slides that are analyzed by algorithms that categorize the sample based on staining and architecture. The result is a spatial database of structural and molecular elements within the tissue...