NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Microsoft Research will work with the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and the University of Geneva’s Proteome Informatics Group in a research collaboration that will combine mass spectrometry with an informatics platform aimed at screening human blood for toxic biomarkers, SIB said Friday.
Under the two-year agreement, Microsoft Research will fund the joint development and implementation of a combined software and database platform that can detect the effects of certain drug chemical fragments found in patients’ blood samples through mass spectrometry screening.
SIB said the Biomedical Proteomics Research Group and Geneva Bioinformatics, two of the Proteome Informatics Group’s partners, also will be involved in the collaboration. GeneBio is a private company founded in 1997 to commercialize SIB’s technology, and it also markets its own Phenyx proteomics software.
The collaboration will seek to identify conflicts between different drugs and eventually will attempt to develop technology that can predict how these conflicts may affect patients, particularly cancer patients.
“The multi-disciplinary expertise in medicine, proteomics and bioinformatics … will allow us to move faster in unraveling a currently major problem in prescribing drugs to patients,” SIB Executive Director Ron Appel said in a statement.
Financial terms of the agreement were not released.