DVS Sciences, developer of the CyTOF mass cytometry platform, this week announced a business agreement with flow cytometry informatics firm Cytobank to develop a cloud-based informatics platform for managing and analyzing CyTOF data.
Named DVS Cytobank, the platform will be released to early-access customers in August with a wide commercial release planned for November. Financial and other details of the agreement were not disclosed.
Combining capabilities of flow cytometry and atomic mass spectrometry, the CyTOF is able to simultaneously quantify as many as 100 protein biomarkers in individual cells at a rate of roughly 1,000 cells per second.
These capabilities make it a potentially valuable tool for large-scale proteomic studies, such as one published in Science last year by Stanford University researcher Garry Nolan (PM 5/13/2011). It also creates a need for informatics tools capable of processing and analyzing such massive quantities of data.
“The marriage of uniquely informative data acquired by our CyTOF instruments and reagents with the powerful capabilities of the Cytobank cloud-based platform will be enabling for our researchers around the world as they analyze, manage, and share large amounts of multi-parameter data,” Joseph Victor, president and CEO of DVS, said in a statement.