The informatics platform is aimed at dealing with the data that has threatened to slow down research and subsequent decision-making during the drug development process. The hope is that this technology will allow GSK to capture, standardize and accelerate decision-making across its discovery research organization.
Using InforSense technology, GSK researchers will access existing in-house cheminformatics tools, data sources, methods, tools and web services, integrating them using InforSense's powerful Open Discovery Workflow technology. The InforSense Discovery Portal provides rapid development of web-services, generated automatically from InforSense workflows, to a large community of scientific users.
A spokeswoman told DrugResearcher.com: "Pharma companies such as GSK, Aventis, AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim have already invested in InforSense Open Discovery Workflow technology."
"We don't provide another tool but rather the environment that enables organisations to exploit their existing assets and to develop and use the platform that is their process knowledge."
InforSense's Open Workflow approach is suitable for microarray studies from data storage, through to mining, analysis, visualization and interpretation. Control of the process can incorporate other analysis methods and applications.
Data can be quickly reassessed in the light of new analysis methods, allowing adaptation to changing requirements and utilise parallel workflow approaches for comparative studies.
Speaking about the state of the current state of the informatics market, the spokeswoman commented that informatics plays a key role in drug discovery and development and that the informatics market was definitely active.
She said: "It is really a period of change rather than buying more end-user tools or choosing single-vendor solutions, the market wants to be able to exploit the IT investments they already have using them to deliver insights when and where they are needed by their internal end-users."
"The informatics market is growing but only for the right products."
The InforSense solution has proved particularly valuable in the data handling of gene expression experiements, being especially geared up to handle the loading of Affymetrix & cDNA gene expression data into MIAME-compliant data. This includes a wide range of normalisation and statistical operations such as RMA dChip and ANWA analysis.
The platform is also optimised for sequence analysis offering tools like BLAST, ClustalW and EMBOSS as well as the ability to handle major data formats like ABI, FASTA, GenBank and EMBL and access SRS, DAS and relational systems. The platform also includes an automated web-service annotation such as Entrez, SwissProt and KEGG.