Roche re-enlists software for personalized medicine research

Amid its hunt for new disease targets, Swiss drug giant Roche ($RHHBY) has renewed a license to Genedata's software for managing omics data to explore molecular pathways and validate biomarkers. The software, called "Genedata Expressionist for Mass Spectrometry," will aid Roche's work in proteomics, according to Switzerland-based Genedata.

Roche has sought and secured technologies that support development of drugs and diagnostics that enable individualized treatments, including DNA sequencing systems and informatics tools. Roche owns 454, a provider of sequencing machines that map the 3 billion base pairs of genomes and other molecules. The company also applies mass spectrometry, which involves studying the structure and composition of molecules. Large amounts of data are generated from mass spectrometry, and Genedata's software enables researchers to corral, analyze and visualize the big datasets.

In the massive datasets produced with analytical tools, Roche, the world's largest provided of cancer treatments, and other pharma outfits aim to find disease targets such as misfit proteins that can be inhibited with drugs. In the case of Roche, which also has one of the world's largest diagnostics businesses, researchers also want to pinpoint disease biomarkers that can be used to detect illnesses.

"We process and analyze extremely large data sets and therefore require reliable, high-throughput, and scalable software to support our innovative mass spec processes," Dr. Hanno Langen, head of Roche's protein and metabolite technologies group, in a statement.

- here's the release