Report urges UK's health service to prepare for ‘genetic revolution’

Qlucore has welcomed the findings of a new report that urges the NHS (the UK National Health Service) to develop the tools and expertise needed to take advantage of the latest revolution in genetic testing. The report, published by the Foundation for Genomics and Population Health, argues that new technologies could soon change care for cancer patients, as well as people with rare conditions.

At the moment, the development of the applications being used in this area is quite often restricted to academic projects. This is an important effort but for long term efficiency and tools development the software industry also need to be involved.

At Qlucore believes that funding for sourcing commercial software solutions should be put higher on the agenda so that the demand for this new functionality can be met by the industry. This way, advanced data analysis software can be developed more effectively and made available to the greatest number of researchers working in this area, even if they are not statisticians or computer experts.

“Understanding the genetic code could revolutionise medicine as we know it, and could one day help researchers to develop treatments that are tailored to an individual patient's needs,” says Carl-Johan Ivarsson, President, Qlucore. “However, scientists working in this area will need to use powerful software tools in order to support important developments in this area. Therefore, we believe that government and university grants for this purpose always should include funds for acquiring analysis software, just as they include funding for buying equipment and collecting samples.”

When studying genetic material, researchers are essentially looking for recognisable patterns in order to distinguish between different groups. However, they are faced with the challenge of trying to extract these “shapes” from huge arrays of genes, proteins and/or RNA molecules.

What comes out of this analysis is an incredible, almost impossible to imagine, amount of data. As such, it has become increasingly difficult to identify which genes are relevant, and to what degree, especially when working with millions – and sometimes billions – of data points.

Also, whenever a study involves such an enormous amount of genetic information, there is bound to be a number of confounding factors that distort the data. However, despite these challenges, it is absolutely essential for scientists working in this area to capture, explore, and analyse this vast amount of data effectively, since this information is vital if they are to apply their findings to real-world conditions.

Qlucore’s Omics Explorer software helps to accelerate and facilitate the understanding of both the context and relationships of the information contained within large data sets by displaying them graphically, in real time. The simplicity of this interaction now makes it possible for researchers to work with powerful and statistical analysis in entirely new ways. Not only that, but faster analysis means that scientists often have more time to test more creative theories, which in turn leads to better research results.

“With key actions and plots now displayed within a fraction of a second, scientists can now use sophisticated, highly intuitive software to perform the research they want and find the results they need instantly,” Carl-Johan Ivarsson adds. “This approach will help to open up new ways of working with the analysis and, as a consequence, could help organisations like the NHS to bring leading biologists back into the analysis phase, so that bioinformaticians and biostatisticians can be freed up to focus their work on developing new algorithms and analytical procedures."

According to a report published by the BBC, the Department of Health has asked the Human Genomic Strategy group to look at advances in this area and to evaluate their benefit to the NHS, as part of a report due to be published in January 2012.

For more information, visit www.qlucore.com

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