NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – BioTime subsidiary LifeMap Sciences and Lab7 Systems are combining their respective products into an integrated offering for next-generation sequence data analysis.
Specifically, the partners are combining LifeMap's VarElect with Lab7's Enterprise Science Platform. VarElect offers tools for prioritizing gene variants based on potential associations to diseases or phenotypes of interest. It makes use of information from LifeMap's GeneCards product, which is an integrated biomedical knowledgebase of human genes, variants, proteins, cells, biological pathways, diseases, and the relationships between them. According to LifeMap, VarElect is presently used in more than 100 hospitals, research institutes, universities, core facilities, and biopharmaceutical and diagnostic companies.
Lab7's ESP product couples laboratory information management system capabilities with an analysis pipeline manager and reporting framework to help customers manage and organize their sequencing workflows. The system is currently used in hospitals and medical research centers, according to the company.
"The combination of VarElect with the end-to-end NGS sample-to-answer software platform offered by Lab7 is a powerful tool enabling basic and clinical research for improved diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of devastating conditions," David Warshawsky, LifeMap's president and CEO, said in a statement.
Access to the GeneCards suite as a result of the integration will help Lab7 customers make better clinical decisions, Christopher Mueller, Lab7's president and chief technology officer, noted.