NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Bioinformatics firm BioDiscovery and the Autism Genetic Resource Exchange today announced a co-marketing agreement that allows AGRE to provide copy number and allelic event data to its researchers through BioDiscovery's Nexus DB platform.
BioDiscovery's platform is for DNA copy number analysis and integrates and processes data from commercial array platforms as well as custom arrays. AGRE, a program of Autism Speaks, collects and houses genetic and phenotypic data on more than 1,300 families with autism.
"There has been a tremendous investment in collection and generation of genomic data to better understand autism, and our agreement with AGRE will enable researchers a new way to more easily access and rapidly analyze this data," Soheil Shams, president of Hawthorne, Calif.-based BioDiscovery, said in a statement.
Clara Lajonchere, vice president of clinical program at Autism Speaks, added that though her organization has provided microarray data in other formats "and will continue to do so, Nexus DB offers AGRE researchers an efficient and user-friendly interface for viewing and analyzing the thousands of microarray experiments which have been done using the AGRE subjects. Our hope is that this will accelerate the discovery of genes that play a role in autism by simplifying the process of analyzing data."
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.