Strand Life Sciences has released two novel software products built on its award winning platform Avadis. While one software, Avadis IMG is to transform Microscopy Image Management, the other is Avadis NGS (Next Generation Sequencing) for genome sequencing analysis.
The products were developed by the Strand’s India team. The company’s US subsidiary, Strand Scientific Intelligence Inc., is handling the product management, sales and marketing for the developed markets, Dr Vijay Chandru, chairman and CEO, Strand Life Sciences and president ABLE told Pharmabiz.
The key purpose to set-up the front end in the US was that 40 per cent of the sales are generated from the region, besides it helped in the partnership with Agilent Corporation. The software has grown 500 per cent between 2007 and 2011.
The Avadis platform, which is one of its core IP assets has the power of analytics to deliver value from large amounts of data, text mining algorithms, analysis tools including novel visualization methods, machine learning and formal statistical tests. Now with the new versions under the Avadis banner, we hope to garner additional revenues, he added.
Currently Avadis NGS is marketed as a desktop application and is designed to meet the bioinformatics challenge of annotating raw sequence data. It provides scalable capabilities for the management, analysis and visualization of large sequencing data. Enterprise and cloud versions of the product are being engineered for release later this year.
To develop Avadis IMG, Strand entered into an exclusive license agreement with 100X Imaging , a joint venture between UCSF and NCBS to develop and market new meta data management technology for microscopy images. With this, microscopy users will have the ability to mine, annotate, search and share sights with collaborators and peers globally.
The target customers would be research biologists working in cell biology imaging. However, the future from a medical perspective is that clinical pathologists will start adopting digital technology, much in the same way as radiologists made the switch. In fact, with both genomics and imaging, the data from the bench are moving into the bedside to address the needs of personalized medicine and adaptive clinical trials. This is the potential of companion diagnostics that has revived the interest of investors in these technologies, said Dr Chandru.
In addition, Strand with Agilent Corporation built around the GeneSpring which is the world’s leading integrated systems biology analysis platform for genomics, proteomics and metabolomics using a pathway visualization model. It is also associated in the design, engineering and support for bio-analytics software like Mass Profiler Pro for the LCMS and GCMS technologies. The IP from these partnerships are jointly owned by both companies.
In the area of systems modelling, Strand uses the Avadis platform for its internal research and as a consulting tool. For example, with a top global pharma major, Strand was asked to understand the biochemistry and develop models for their discovery and development programmes in cardiovascular system and bone turnover. For these projects, it identified various subsystems of interest, mathematically modelled the processes and developed the models capable of simulating the functions. The cardiovascular project leveraged Strand’s proprietary virtual liver platform as it enabled researchers to model the buildup of cholesterol in the cardiovascular system.
In the case of the osteoporosis model, Strand built the model to help the pharma design its clinical trials and identify biomarkers of efficacy, stated Dr Chandru.