NEW YORK (GenomeWeb News) – The USTAR Center for Genetic Discovery has launched.
The center was launched this month with $6 million from the University of Utah and the state-funded Utah Science Technology and Research initiative. Housed in the university's School of Medicine, the center will develop and commercialize computational methods of discovery relationships between genes and diseases. Mark Yandell and Gabor Marth, professors of human genetics at the university, are the co-directors.
According to USTAR's website, researchers at the new center will build a computational software infrastructure to store and annotate sequencing data from patients enrolled in studies. The data will then be processed and analyzed with the goal of discovering defective genes that may be the cause of diseases.
The center will be using Omicia's informatics platform called Opal "to distill genome data to clinically relevant findings."
Opal is Omicia's cloud-based software-as-a-service bioinformatics platform for genomic analysis. In December, the University of Utah licensed Opal for use in the Utah Genome Project, as BioInform reported.