Applying Multi-omics And Meta-omics Data Analysis To Advance Precision Medicine

The Life Sciences Research & Development team at Persistent Systems has partnered with leading research institutions to accelerate insights into cancer and other disease progressions through multi-omics data analysis and interpretation.

These research efforts apply Persistent’s expertise in software integration, development, management, and analysis of large-scale biological and clinical data sets to glean new insights by drawing from public datasets such as  The Cancer Genome Atlas, or TCGA.

Using their expertise in technology and data analysis and interpretation, Persistent researchers have been able to leverage the multi-level molecular information from multi-omics data to identify patterns in the datasets with the following applications:

• Predict molecular features/biomarkers
• Accelerate clinical research and drug development
• Insights into disease biology
• Automated and customized pipelines/solutions
• Reduce the overall cost of care

The initiatives include:

1. Isolating molecular signatures for Triple Negative Breast Cancer (TNBC), the 15-20% of breast cancers that test negative for estrogen receptors, progesterone receptors, and excess HER2 protein.
   Due to its aggressive nature and lack of effective targeted therapies, these patients generally have a poorer prognosis relative to other subtypes of breast cancer.
   Understanding the tumorigenesis from a multi-omics perspective may lead to inroads in targeted therapies for TNBC, along with the potential to explore new prognostic or predictive markers.
2. Examining the role lymphocytes may play in the detection or assessment of TNBC treatments. Patients with elevated levels of tumor-Infiltrating lymphocytes (TILs), show improved survival rates on chemotherapy treatment, along with improved overall survival rates.
   Recently, TILs have become an important prognostic as well as predictive marker in cancers. However, current protocols for assessment are too subjective, creating an opportunity to identify alternative biomarkers.
   Persistent researchers have partnered with the Indiana University School of Medicine to analyze gene expression data from TCGA to identify potential molecular signatures that differentiate TNBC patients with high TILs from those with low TILs.
3. Developing a comprehensive portal to accelerate cancer understanding among clinicians and researchers. Persistent researchers have tapped into the company’s decades of digital solution development expertise to create a comprehensive, customized portal to help oncologists and cancer researchers better understand the clinically important features of cancer heterogeneity and disease progression.
   The platform relies on a custom bioinformatics analysis pipeline incorporating multi-omics and clinical data and includes drug targets, cancer hallmarks, and more from public repositories—delivered via interactive visualizations to assist and accelerate clinical decision making through the identification of probable biomarkers and stratification of patients based on molecular signatures, patient risk status and treatment regimen.

Persistent’s efforts in the domain of oncology data have steered them to be the data management and analytics partner in the new initiative, Indian Cancer Genome Atlas (ICGA), a project inspired by TCGA, to study the portfolio of cancers in the Indian population.

In addition, Persistent researchers are partnering with the University of Minnesota to apply the study of meta-transcriptomics and meta-proteomics data to better understand the functional role of microbial communities.
In this collaborative project, microbiome RNA and protein expression data are utilized to study how microbial communities behave by combining the transcriptome and the proteome data to derive meaningful insights into the microbiome dynamics, in humans and other living organisms.

Partnership opportunities welcome

The Life Sciences Research & Development team at Persistent Systems are actively seeking research organizations and institutions that would require guidance in biological data handling, analysis and interpretation, and technology and management partners to accelerate the production of meaningful research, clinical trials, and products.

If your organization is looking for partners to catalyze your own efforts to date, our research team would produce a Proof of Concept, analyzing and interpreting public and/or proprietary multi-omics data to demonstrate our capabilities.

To find out more about partnership opportunities with the Life Sciences Research & Development teams at Persistent Systems, CLICK HERE.