Biomarkers

A systematic view of biology presumes that the state of the system may be inferred from the relative abundance of genes, proteins and metabolites. Changes in the system due to disease, toxicity or the application of a drug will therefore result in markers which are characteristic of the state. High throughput experimental platforms, such as microarrays for genes and NMR for metabolites, enable large numbers of measurements from multiple samples to be compared between states in order to identify markers for, for example, disease or toxicity.

Although conceptually simple, the automated discovery of metabolic markers is currently frustrated by a range of data analysis challenges, including inter-individual variability, process related artefacts, the presence of confounding factors, and large data volumes. Biomarker discovery has therefore remained manually intensive and highly dependent on each individual researcher's experience of the relevant mathematics, biology and experimental platforms.

In collaboration with the pharmaceutical industry BlueGnome has developed a comprehensive service for the discovery and screening of candidate metabolic markers using NMR and mass spectrometry data.

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