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Press Releases [2008]
A*STAR’S SINGAPORE IMMUNOLOGY NETWORK IS THE FIRST GENEGO CENTER OF EXCELLENCE IN ASIA
St. Joseph, Michigan, December 10th, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., a leading provider of software and databases for systems biology and pathway analysis, today announced that A*STAR’s Singapore Immunology Network (SIgN) has become a certified GeneGo Center of Excellence (COE). SIgN researchers will have access to GeneGo’s MetaCore, training and advanced support. SIgN COE will provide a pathway analysis environment for all SIgN researchers.
“We are excited to work with SIgN, one of the premium life sciences research institutes in the world,” said Julie Bryant, Vice President of Business Development at GeneGo. “We look forward to building closer relationships with SIgN investigators and growing the number of MetaCore users in Singapore.”
THE BURNHAM INSTITUTE FOR MEDICAL RESEARCH BECOMES A GENEGO CENTER OF EXCELLENCE USING METACORE FOR STEM CELL RESEARCH AND NEUROLOGY
St. Joseph, MI. December 2nd, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., the leading systems biology tools company, announced today that Burnham has become a certified GeneGo Center of Excellence. Burnham researchers will have institution-wide access to GeneGo’s MetaCore data analysis suite, training and advanced support. The Burnham institute is a world-class biomedical research facility running multiple OMICs experimental studies throughout many departments, including research in cancer, stem cells, and neurobiology. MetaCore will provide a central data repository, management and collaboration platform integrated with a manually curated knowledge base and tools for seamless analyses of these studies.
“Burnham is in our backyard and we are very pleased to welcome them as a new GeneGo customer and Center of Excellence,” said Julie Bryant, GeneGo’s VP of Business development. “Stem cells, chemical biology, and disease specific pathway analysis platforms are among our research priorities and we are looking forward to a long term productive partnership.“
GENEGO IS AWARDED NCI GRANT FOR DEVELOPMENT OF SYSTEMS BIOLOGY DATABASE AND TOOLS FOR NUTRITION IN CANCER IN COLLABORATION WITH THE FDA
St Joseph, Michigan, September 30th, 2008 - GeneGo Inc., a leading provider of databases, tools and services in systems biology, announced today that they were awarded with a Phase I SBIR grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) for the development of a platform for understanding the influence of nutrients on cancerogenesis and cancer prevention. GeneGo will collaborate with FDA investigator, Jim Kaput Director of Personalized Nutrition and Medicine, on the project. The new platform will include a comprehensive manually curated database on nutrition, an OMICs data repository, advanced search and statistical modeling tools.
“For the last 60 years, it has been well established that cancer and nutrition are intrinsically connected,” said Yuri Nikolsky, CEO of GeneGo and the grant’s PI. “However, this knowledge is scattered in thousands of sources, which are difficult to annotate and categorize. We will assemble the first specialized database on the topic and develop automated tools for data analysis. The new platform will be primarily targeting healthcare professionals and nutritionists.”
MD ANDERSON BECOMES A GENEGO CENTER OF EXCELLENCE USING METACORE FOR ONCOLOGY RESEARCH
St. Joseph, MI. September 2nd, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., the leading systems biology tools
company, announced today that MD Anderson has become a certified GeneGo Center of
Excellence. MD Anderson researchers will have institution-wide access to GeneGo’s MetaCore data analysis suite, training and advanced support. MD Anderson specializes in cancer treatment and
research and is well known for its advanced clinical trials programs. MetaCore will be used throughout
many research programs both as a central data repository, management and collaboration platform for
clinical OMICs data and as an integrative pathway analysis suite.
Mary E. Edgerton, a pathologist performing cancer research at MD Anderson and a long-term
client, says “I have been using Metacore for many years in my research into pathways and
networks that control aggressive behavior in cancers. I am currently using it to infer networks
from analysis of gene expression array data for pathways in lung, brain, and breast cancer. I
also use the curated pathways to formulate mathematical models of molecular networks that
predict tumor behavior using multiscale modeling. Not only do I find the product to be very
useful, but I also appreciate the responsiveness of the staff at Genego to my technical questions
and suggestions.”
“MD Anderson is renowned for their pioneering work in oncology, I have known some of the MD’s there for a while and I admire their dedication to their patients and to working hard to find
cures.” said Julie Bryant, GeneGo’s VP of Business development. “We are proud to have them as an institution customer and a Center of Excellence. We have a large development program in the area of cancer system biology tools supported by NCI and we are glad to see this work
appreciated by some of the best oncology professionals in the world working at MD
Anderson.”
UNIVERSITY OF MIAMI MILLER SCHOOL OF MEDICINE BECOMES A GENEGO CENTER OF EXCELLENCE
St. Joseph, Michigan, July 15th, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., a leading provider of software and
databases for systems biology and pathway analysis, today announced that the University
of Miami Miller School of Medicine has become a certified GeneGo Center of Excellence
(COE). Miller School of Medicine researchers will have access to GeneGo’s MetaCore,
training and advanced support. COE will provide a pathway analysis environment and
support for all the school’s researchers. They will also act as a training facility for GeneGo
in the University of Miami.
“We are looking forward to working with GeneGo as the company provides the kind of
forward-looking bioinformatics software that we are excited to use,” said Sawsan Khuri,
Ph.D., assistant research professor at the Center for Computational Science at the
University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. “The technology will be extremely useful
for researchers here, especially those at the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis and the Miami
Institute for Human Genomics, both of which will benefit greatly from the collaboration
with GeneGo as we work toward new scientific breakthroughs.”
“The University of Miami has some important thought leaders in this field and we are
pleased to be working with them” said Julie Bryant, Vice President of Business
Development at GeneGo. “The school of medicine works with one million patients
annually and it is encouraging that we can help them to improve their quality of life.”
YALE KECK MICROARRAY CENTER BECOMES A GENEGO CENTER OF EXCELLENCE
St. Joseph, MI. July 8th, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., the leading systems biology tools company, announced today that Keck Microarray Center at Yale has become a certified GeneGo Center of Excellence (COE). Yale researchers will have access to GeneGo’s MetaCore, training and advanced support.
The W. M. Keck Foundation Biotechnology Resource Laboratory (Keck Lab), one of the largest biotechnology laboratories of its kind in academia, is a world leader in the field of genomics and proteomics. The Keck Microarray Resource is also a part of the NIH-Neuroscience supported Yale Microarray Center for Research on the Nervous system. The Yale Microarray Center is one of four national centers which together form a Consortium that provide gene expression and genotyping services at significantly reduced costs to approximately 10,000 NIH-funded neuroscientists from 15 branches of NIH that are part of the NIH-Neuroscience Blueprint.
It is anticipated that MetaCore will be used at Yale to study basic and translational research; cancer biology; neuroscience research; and other clinical conditions. Overall the COE will provide a pathway analysis environment and support for all the University’s researchers and will also act as a training facility for GeneGo.
“MetaCore is being heavily used by our users and we find it to be very intuitive, easy to use and powerful tool for performing pathway analysis of the microarray data,“ said Dr Shrikant Mane, Director of Keck Microarray Resource.
“Neurosciences is one of the key diseases we have chosen to focus on this year and working with Yale is important to GeneGo as they are a leader in this field,” said Julie Bryant, GeneGo’s VP of Business development. “We are very pleased to have them as a GeneGo Center of Excellence.”
VTT TECHNICAL RESEARCH CENTRE OF FINLAND LICENSES METACORE FROM GENEGO FOR CANCER RESEARCH AND DIAGNOSTICS
St. Joseph, MI. June 24th, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., the leading systems biology tools company,
announced today that VTT has licensed MetaCoreTM. VTT develops novel high-throughput
methods for cancer research, drug discovery and diagnostics. The focus is in investigating
mechanisms of cancer development and progression, identification of therapeutic targets and
exploration of the mechanism of action of anti-cancer compounds. VTT will utilize MetaCore
and MetaDrug in high-throughput compound screening, RNA interference experiments, cell
biology and bioinformatics projects to identify pathways and networks important in
translational cancer research.
There are 85 researchers and staff members working in VTT’s Medical Biotechnology
Knowledge Centre in Turku. The research is funded by the European Commission and the
Academy of Finland. VTT accommodates two EU Marie Curie Centre of Excellence teams and
coordinates the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence for translational genome-wide
biology. Further information on VTT: http://www.vtt.fi.
“VTT was our first customer in Finland and an important internationally recognized cancer
research center,” said Julie Bryant, GeneGo’s VP of Business development. “We have seen a
growing need for analysis platforms focused in disease areas recently. We responded by
developing disease pathway ontologies, biomarker and drug databases and new interactome
analysis tools. We are pleased that our expertise in cancer is appreciated by professional
molecular oncologists at VTT.”
GENEGO IS AWARDED NCI GRANT FOR DEVELOPMENT OF SYSTEMS BIOLOGY PLATFORM FOR INTEGRATIVE DATA ANALYSIS IN CANCER
St Joseph, Michigan, June 17th, 2008 - GeneGo Inc., a leading provider of databases,
software and services in systems biology, announced today that they were awarded a
Phase I SBIR from National Cancer Institute (NCI) for the development of a platform for
functional data analysis in cancer. GeneGo will collaborate with investigators at Dana-
Farber Cancer Institute, Boston on the project. The system, MetaMiner (Oncology) will
combine pathway and network analysis tools, act as a OMICs data repository and have
advanced statistical tools based on functional descriptors.
“MetaMiner (Oncology) is a new generation pathway analysis tool, specifically tailored
for biologists, clinicians and chemists working in different cancer areas,” said Yuri
Nikolsky, CEO of GeneGo and the grant’s PI. “Neoplasms are tremendously complex
diseases, with many hundreds of perturbed pathways, both in terms of gain and loss of
functions. We need to understand in a database structure the causal relationships between
the involved pathways and the dynamics of pathway activation during tumorigenesis.
These are two main goals of the MetaMiner project.”
“There are many “generic” pathway tools on the market, helpful to some extent in
cancer data analysis. However, none of them is centered around cancer biology, which is
essential,” said Kornelia Polyak, an Associate Professor at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
and a consultant on the grant. “Another focus will be on the development of pathwaybased
tools for integration of different types of OMICs data – somatic mutations, high
copy number genes, epigenetics, gene expression, proteomics and metabolomics.”
KINEMED LICENSES GENEGO'S METACORE
St. Joseph, Michigan, June 10th, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., a leading provider of software and
databases for systems biology, today announced that KineMed Inc. has licensed MetaCore for
application to its ongoing multi-center Phase II prognostic study of chronic lymphocytic leukemia
(CLL). KineMed’s kinetic biomarker of CLL flux as a predictor of disease course is intended to
stratify indolent (simmering) versus aggressive disease.
“KineMed’s biological pathway insights and GeneGo’s database for systems biology link network
complexity to physiologic phenotypes and disease genotypes which is one of the primary goals for
personalized medicine. These insights will answer the challenge of determining the right medicine
for the right patient at the right time”, said Gregory Hayes, Ph.D., Director of Oncology Research at
KineMed. GeneGo’s genetic pathway database aligns with KineMed’s phenotypic pathway analysis
and facilitates identification of genetic polymorphisms and expression patterns that directly link
genetics with KineMed’s in vivo disease biomarker.
“Building cancer specific pathway analysis software and databases is a key focus area for GeneGo
this year, ” said Julie Bryant, VP business development. " We have a lot of expertise in this area
that is reflected in our grants and publications in Science and Cancer cell".
GENEGO EXTENDS AGREEMENT WITH MERCK & CO., INC.
St. Joseph, Michigan, June 3rd, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., a leading provider of software and
databases for systems biology, today announced that Merck & Co., Inc. has extended its global
enterprise agreement. This agreement provides Merck with access to GeneGo’s content through
MetaBase which includes access to MetaCore and MetaDrug content and GeneGo’s internal
database of disease biomarkers.
“Effective use of powerful systems biology data mining & analysis solutions have become an
essential component of modern day drug discovery and development,” said Julie Bryant, VP
business development. "Merck is one of our first customers and we are pleased that they have
chosen to renew and extend their agreement."
GENEGO’S FIRST CUSTOMER IN HONG KONG; THE CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG
St. Joseph, Michigan, April 22nd, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., the leading provider of software and
databases for systems biology and pathway analysis, today announced that the Chinese University
of Hong Kong, Pediatric department will be using GeneGo’s MetaCore™. Broad coverage of
biomarkers and drug targets for a large variety of diseases in MetaCore was an important factor for
the decision to license MetaCore, as well as species-specific content for the main animal models
used in disease research.
“We are very pleased to have the Chinese University of Hong Kong as a customer as we extend our
reach in Asia,” said Julie Bryant, VP business development. “Hong Kong is a very sophisticated
market with top notch researchers in oncology and other key diseases, and we are glad that the
CUHK group has chosen MetaCore. Disease area specific content is one of our important
development goals for the next 3 years.”
THE SCRIPPS TRANSLATIONAL SCIENCE INSTITUTE JOINS THE METAMINER CARDIAC CONSORTIUM
St. Joseph, MI. April 15th, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., the leading systems biology tools company,
announced today that The Scripps Translational Science Institute have joined the MetaMiner
Cardiac Consortium. The goal of the Consortium is to build the first systems biology and
pathway analysis platform for cardiovascular diseases in the world. The Consortium members
will vote on deliverables that will include disease specific pathway maps and networks built by
experts in the field. GeneGo will also develop relevant ontologies for cardiovascular diseases
and drugs. The MetaMiner environment will also serve as a repository for OMICs and other
experimental data.
“We are very excited to have The Scripps Translational Science Institute, lead by Dr. Eric
Topol, Director as a member. He is a world renowned expert in this field and will provide
strong leadership for the project,” said Julie Bryant, GeneGo’s VP of Business development.
“The cardiovascular disease area is complex and a challenging field. We believe that
MetaMiner Cardiac will have an impact on both basic research and drug discovery in this
area.”
GENEGO ROLLS OUT METAMINER CYSTIC FIBROSIS -- THE FIRST DISEASE - SPECIFIC SOFTWARE PLATFORM TO ADVANCE DRUG DISCOVERY
St. Joseph, MI. March 26th, 2008. GeneGo, Inc., the leading systems biology tools company,
announced today the release of MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis, a first of its kind software and
database platform designed to help advance drug discovery for cystic fibrosis, a lifethreatening
genetic disease. This novel, disease-specific tool will provide the cystic fibrosis
research community with state-of-the art methods for integrating and analyzing cystic fibrosis
data.
Cystic Fibrosis Foundation Therapeutics, Inc., a non-profit affiliate of the Cystic Fibrosis
Foundation, provided funding and guidance to the project with the goal of leveraging systems
biology technology and accumulating data in order to accelerate drug discovery for this
disease. Cystic fibrosis affects 30,000 people in the United States, and ten million Americans
are symptomless carriers of a CF gene.
“MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis is an important new tool for the cystic fibrosis research
community,” said Robert J. Beall, Ph.D., president and CEO of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation.
“It will allow the integration of important new results with existing literature and speed up the
rate of insights that can lead to new therapeutic interventions.”
“We are very pleased to announce the completion of the initial phase of the project,” said Julie
Bryant, GeneGo’s VP of Business Development. “We enjoyed working with the Foundation
and the team of world-class experts they assembled for this project. In phase one, we built a
database of all relevant small experiments information on the disease as well as over 30 cystic
fibrosis specific pathway maps and networks. We believe this environment will help find a
cure for cystic fibrosis faster as we move in to the next phase of the collaboration”.
MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis includes off-the-shelf GeneGo products -- MetaCore, MetaDrug
and MapEditor -- as well as cystic fibrosis experiments content annotated by GeneGo in the
form of disease maps, networks and a database of biomarkers and active compounds. A
committee of researchers from the cystic fibrosis community guided the cystic fibrosis-specific
annotation under the sponsorship of CFFT. MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis provides researchers
with the ability to interpret emerging data from global experiments, like arrays or proteomics,
and link it with published literature on cystic fibrosis.
GeneGo’s MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis will enable cystic fibrosis researchers to visualize
complex information and prioritize research initiatives. It will also help researchers to be open
to other interpretations of their experimental data and allow them to rank the significance of
their results. Additionally, MetaMiner Cystic Fibrosis will reduce the learning curve for
researchers moving into the CF field and permit new investigators to understand outcomes
more quickly.
GLAXOSMITHKLINE EXTENDS GENEGO LICENSE AND ADDS NEW PRODUCTS
St. Joseph, MI. February 5th, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., the leading systems biology tools company, announced today that GlaxoSmithKline has extended their licensing agreement with GeneGo and have added additional capability. This will provide GlaxoSmithKline researchers with global access to MetaCore, MapEditor and MetaBase. MetaCore is GeneGo’s flagship platform for functional analysis of biological OMICs data featuring a comprehensive collection of pathway maps and network models for cellular processes and common diseases. MetaCore is used for target identification, validation, biomarker discovery and knowledge mining. GlaxoSmithKline will also use the platform as a repository of all types of experimental data as well as resulting analyses. All of this information can be easily shared with individuals or groups. MetaBase is direct access to the manually curated database of pathways, networks, ontologies, medicinal chemistry and diseases covering human, mouse and rat. MapEditor is a powerful research tool for creating intereractive custom maps which amalgamate MetaBase knowledge content with proprietary information and data.
“We have a good working relationship with GlaxoSmithKline developing new products such as our pay as you go 1-2-3 Workflow,” said Julie Bryant, GeneGo’s VP of Business development. “We will continue to work closely developing new functionality, tools and content for GlaxoSmithKline.”
U.S. ARMY CENTER FOR ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH RESEARCH LICENSES METACORE FOR BIOMARKER RESEARCH
St. Joseph, Michigan, January 29th, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., a leading provider of software and
databases for systems biology, today announced that the U.S. Army has extended their license of
MetaCore. The US Army Center for Environmental Health Research will use MetaCore in its
Biomarker Discovery Program to identify novel biomarkers for exposure to TICs/TIMs in order to
provide enhanced health surveillance for military personnel.
“We are pleased that institutes on the bleeding edge of technology such as the U.S. Army are using
MetaCore in their research” said Julie Bryant, Vice President of Business Development at GeneGo.
“Soldiers and other service members can be exposed to a large number of toxic industrial chemicals
and materials (TICs/TIMs) from occupational sources, from environmental pollution or as result of
military activity. We are proud that our software may help in an ongoing research on environmental
pollution dangers”.
FINNISH RED CROSS LICENSES GENEGO PRODUCTS
St. Joseph, MI. January 22nd, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., the leading systems biology tools company,
announced today that the Finnish Red Cross Blood Service has licensed GeneGo’s bioinformatics
and chemoinformatics suites MetaCore™ and MetaDrug™, respectively, to be used in a variety of
research and clinical projects.
“The entrepreneur knowledgebase behind the merged platform is impressive in the areas of cell
adhesion and immunology, which is essential in blood transfusion field,” said docent Jukka
Partanen, research director at the FRC Blood Service R&D.
In a joint effort with the Finnish hospitals, FRC Blood Service is collecting clinical information from
nearly 70% of the patients receiving blood transfusions in the country, to optimize the blood
component usage far beyond 2000 annual diagnoses. Beside the blood group and cell type analysis
in disease and pregnancy, we are working with tissue typing of donors and recipients in organ, bone
marrow and cord blood and bone marrow stem cell replacement transplantations.
“In the market, we have not found any other manually curated platform where multiple parallel
omics data could be submitted in a batch mode in such a systems medicine fashion. We are delighted
that the curation does not ignore the non-English journals and reviews patent literature as well. The
principle of taking only causality and not mere association into account is critical in the era of NLP
text mining servers and HTS data flood,” said Jukka Partanen.
“We are very pleased to be working with such a prestigious organization,” said Julie Bryant VP of
Business development for GeneGo. “Disease-centric systems medicine is a natural and logical step
in the development of our tools and databases and we are excited to see healthcare organizations
such as Finnish Red Cross using it in such practical and important way.”
GENEGO COLLABORATES WITH UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS AT URBANACHAMPAIGN TO INCLUDE BOVINE SPECIES INTO METACORE
St. Joseph, Michigan, January 15th, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., a leading provider of software and
databases for systems biology, today announced they will include bovine orthologs in the next
release of MetaCore, in collaboration with University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign whom
identified the matching bovine-mouse-rat-human orthologous pairs. The latest version MetaCore
4.5 already includes mouse, rat, fly, worm, yeast, chicken, chimpanzee, Rhesus Macaque, dog, and
Malaria plasmodium, making MetaCore the broadest platform available for non-human species
research. MetaCore also has a unique rat and mouse specific interaction database called
MetaRodent.
“We are happy to collaborate with UIUC on inclusion of bovine orthologs into MetaCore. They did
a superb job of ortholog identification”, said Tatiana Nikolskaya, President of GeneGo. “With the
rapid advance of sequencing technology, new eukaryotic genomes are becoming available at an
increasing rate, and each genome comes with an academic research community. And as each
community requests tools for functional analysis of their organism of choice, we see an increasing
demand for expansion of the list of species in the database.”
“GeneGo is definitely leading the way for species coverage,” said Julie Bryant, VP of Business
Development. “We provide more species and unique interaction databases for mouse and rat that
will grow as we continue to innovate.”
Harris Lewin, Principal Investigator and Director of the Institute for Genomic Biology at UIUC had
this to say”We were very pleased to work with the team at GeneGo on the identification of cattle
orthologs. My group feels that MetaCore is currently the premier product for data mining and
pathway analysis. The addition of bovine orthologs of human, mouse and rat genes to MetaCore
will make the recently sequenced cattle genome more accessible for functional genomics and
systems biology.”
UC BERKELEY EXPANDS MOLECULAR TOXICOLOGY CURRICULUM TO INCLUDE GENEGO'S PLATFORM
St. Joseph, MI. January 8th 20th, 2008 – GeneGo, Inc., the leading provider of databases,
software and services in systems biology, announced today that UC Berkeley will expand the use of
its MetaCore/MetaDrug Discovery Platform in their Computational Toxicology course, a required
component for Molecular Toxicology majors, and in undergrad honors research programs. The
agreement will provide students with chemical structure, network and pathway analysis tools needed
to analyze complex omics datasets and to predict and understand the beneficial and potentially
harmful effects of chemicals in humans and other species.
“When we designed our Computational Toxicology course a few years ago we anticipated a shift in
the future toward ‘systems biology’ that is, looking at the complex interactions of metabolic, genetic,
protein, and cellular elements with the goal of modeling entire systems in relation to chemical
stresses,” said Dale Johnson, Pharm.D., Ph.D., Adjunct Professor, who designed and teaches the
Computational Toxicology course. “The complexity of these chemical/biological interactions
resulting from environmental exposures, food sources, or pharmaceutical compounds, highlights our
thinking that an overall systems approach will be necessary if relevant advances are to be made in
applying computational solutions. GeneGo has presented us with an outstanding platform that
continues to grow in functionality each year. We are extremely pleased to be able to utilize
MetaCore/MetaDrug as the core part of our coursework.”
“We are pleased with the decision of UC Berkeley's Department of Nutritional Sciences and
Toxicology to include our tools in its curriculum, which is one of the very best in the world,”
said Julie Bryant, Vice President of Business Development for GeneGo. “The study of fundamental
biology is changing quickly with omics technology and systems level analysis, and these changes
affect application fields such as toxicology. UC Berkeley will be educating a new breed of
toxicology researchers that are needed for the future success of taking drugs to market.”
“Today’s drug and chemical safety assessment process increasingly leverages information from
many different sources,” said Dr. Richard Brennan, GeneGo’s Director of Toxicology. “Molecular
toxicologists need to be able to put traditional toxicology measurements in the context of chemical
information as well as biochemical, gene expression, protein and metabolite data. Industry needs
scientists well-versed in complex systems biology data, and in the powerful and flexible analysis
tools increasingly used in safety assessment. UC Berkeley is leading the way in providing training in
current and emerging technologies, and we are pleased to be able to contribute to this cutting-edge
program.”
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