Cira Discovery Sciences claims that its data-mining technology can bend and stretch to handle biosequence analysis, cheminformatics, and gene expression and SNP analysis. But rather than showcase its proprietary approach in one of these well-established analytical realms, Cira, a Philadelphia-based startup, has chosen the burgeoning, yet controversial, field of proteomics-based diagnostics for one of its first proof-of-principle collaborations. This week, the company announced a collaboration with the Wistar Institute to develop pattern-based diagnostics for lung cancer.