CLC Bio to Develop Bioinformatics Solution for $4M Prostate Cancer Biomarker Project

Bioinformatics firm CLC Bio is to participate in a $4 million Danish collaboration focused on identifying and validating biomarkers of prostate cancer risk and aggressiveness. Headed by researchers at the Department of Molecular Medicine at Aarhus University Hospital, the initiative is funded by the Danish Council for Strategic Research. CLC will be responsible for developing a bioinformatics platform to allow the integrated analysis of microarray and next-generation sequencing data for biomarker identification.

“It is within our core focus to invest, design, and develop novel bioinformatics software for doing research into molecular diagnostics,” comments Roald Forsberg, Ph.D., director of R&D at CLC bio. “This prostate cancer project is a perfect fit for us as we will have the opportunity to team up with world-renowned researchers in our development of a user-friendly and comprehensive functional genomics platform for integrated analysis of CNV, LOH, methylation, mRNA, miRNA, ncRNA, and other cancer-related biomarkers. Our planned integration with advanced visualization tools and with various scientific data sources will make this solution truly unique.”

Collaborators on the project will include teams at the Bioinformatics Research Centre and the Research Unit for General Medicina at Aarhus University, the Norris Comprehensive Center at USC, the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the Beijing Genomics Institute.

CLC bio’s flagship product is a cross-analysis solution that the firm claims can analyze and visualize genomic, transcriptomic, and epigenomic data from all major platforms including Illumina’s Genome Analyzer, SOLiD by Applied Biosystems, 454 by Roche, and HeliScope by Helicos.