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Swiss Organizations Partner to Improve Flow Cytometry Data Analysis

NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – A group of Swiss partners today announced a collaboration to develop, use, and promote a flow cytometry data analysis platform.

The deal brings together the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics, Geneva Bioinformatics (GeneBio), and Quartz Bio to combine SIB's MegaClust analysis platform with Quartz Bio's expertise in clinical data analysis "to provide unprecedented unbiased in-depth analysis of flow cytometry data," the firms said in a statement.

MegaClust — developed jointly by GeneBio and Vital-IT, SIB's Bioinformatics Competence Center — identifies phenotypically similar cell populations in large datasets of many samples. According to the partners, MegaClust provides quantitative cross-sample analyses for the stratification of individuals and the analyses of variations in cell subpopulations "upon stimulations and candidate treatments."

They said that although flow cytometry is increasingly being used in clinical trials to evaluate the safety and efficacy of candidate drugs and to identify biomarkers for patient stratification, analyzing clinical flow cytometry data continues to be challenging. Clinical flow cytometry research often contains large numbers of samples from multiple sources and curating and manually analyzing the data can be time-consuming and prone to errors.

"We think the integration of MegaClust in the Quartz Bio analysis pipeline will allow us to provide our customers with a technology able to fully extract and leverage the value of their flow cytometry data," Ioannis Xenarios, director of Vital-IT, said in a statement.

MegaClust is financially supported by the Commission for Technology and Innovation, the innovation promotion agency of the Swiss Confederation.

"Collaborating with the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics in [flow cytometry data analysis] is for Quartz Bio an exciting opportunity to bridge academic with [the] clinical research world and offer clinical bioinformatics services of unprecedented added value to our customers," Jérôme Wojcik, founder and CEO of Quartz Bio, said.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

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