As part of its participation in a European research consortium, Qlucore has been tapped to develop a prototype of a mobile application that will help physicians plan more personalized treatment strategies.
The Swedish bioinformatics firm has been awarded €600,000 ($796,000) over a three-year period to develop mathematical and statistical algorithms that will be able to integrate genetic, proteomic, and patient-specific clinical data for the PoC-HCV consortium, a body that aims to develop biomarker tests for clinical research and to treat and monitor hepatitis C patients.
The app will combine this information to help clinicians classify patients based on disease status and also help them select the most optimal treatments, Carl-Johan Ivarsson, Qlucore's CEO, told BioInform. He also said that his firm plans to have a prototype of the app within two years, and that the consortium is still deciding which operating system to use for the first launch.
Qlucore also plans to make as subset of the capabilities it develops for the app available in upcoming versions of Omics Explorer, its software for analyzing array and next-generation sequencing data. These capabilities, which will support discovery and research applications only, should be available to customers in the next 18 to 24 months, Ivarsson said.
Qlucore's grant is part of a larger €6.0 million ($7.9 million) grant from the European Commission's 7th Framework program awarded to the PoC-HCV consortium. Members include INSERM, Epistem, and Biosurfit.
Founded in 2007, Qlucore started as a collaborative research project at Lund University initially aimed at developing tools for microarray gene expression analysis. The software now provides tools for analyzing proteomic, DNA methylation, protein array, and miRNA data, as well.
Qlucore's current customers include the Health Sciences Research Institute of the Germans Trias i Pujol Foundation, which is using Omics Explorer to study various bowel diseases (BI 9/30/2011). The company has also been funded by Vinnova — the Swedish Governmental Agency for Innovation Systems — to develop NGS data analysis for Omics explorer that will be made available next year (BI 5/3/2013).