NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Compendia Bioscience today said it has been awarded a $1.3 million Small Business Innovation Research Fast Track grant to incorporate miRNA data and analyses into its Oncomine platform.
The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based bioinformatics firm will capture, curate, and analyze novel miRNA data in a standardized fashion and provide the data and analyses in a user-friendly format "that promotes ongoing inquiry," the firm said in a statement.
While miRNA has increasingly been implicated in cancer development, progression, and metastasis, it is impossible for cancer biologists to survey a patient's differential expression of miRNA across all published datasets, or to integrate knowledge about miRNA expression patterns with other biological phenomena, such as gene expression, copy number, and mutation data, Compendia said.
With the SBIR grant, Compendia will make miRNA data accessible through its Oncomine platform, which contains more than 41,000 curated cancer profiles, while an analysis engine and web application enables data mining and visualization of the profiles.
"This effort will require significant technical innovation to capture, organize, and present data that is both biologically and technically complex in a way that is rapidly comprehensible to the cancer biologist," the company said.