NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – Thomson Reuters' Intellectual Property & Science business announced a deal with the CHDI Foundation to develop systems biology tools for Huntington's disease.
The terms of the collaboration, announced on Thursday, include the reconstruction and analysis of causal networks that underlie HD mechanisms, and building a comprehensive collection of HD pathology pathway maps.
One goal of the deal, called the MetaMiner Partnership, is to identify disease mechanisms by network analysis of gene expression data in patients who have different numbers of CAG repeats in the huntingtin gene. The number of CAG repeats can predict the age of disease onset, Thomson Reuters said.
It added that in work carried out for MetaMiner for HD, a program focusing on HD pathway reconstruction, it and collaborators have generated 15 specific HD pathway maps and its partnership with CHDI will build on that effort. Once completed, images of the new HD pathway maps will be available on CHDI's website and through Thomson Reuters' MetaCore analysis tool suite.
Financial and other terms of the deal were not disclosed.