Bayer tackles informatics challenges in cancer research

Bayer Healthcare Pharmaceuticals wants analytics that help its cancer researchers make use of ever-increasing amounts of genomic data. Working with Helsinki, Finland-based bioinformatics firm MediSapiens, the U.S. unit of Germany's Bayer Healthcare has agreed to develop a data management and analysis platform to tackle the challenge of making effective use of genomics data in oncology research.

Bayer, which sells the targeted kidney cancer drug Nexavar, is among many pharma groups trying to use genomics data in the development of new therapies and diagnostics to personalize cancer treatment. With high-throughput sequencing tools spitting out loads of genomic data to analyze, there's been a push to create informatics to streamline such analysis.

For its part, MediSapiens builds bioinformatics tools for cancer research and appears to specialize in assisting companies developing personalized treatments.

"Genomics data is increasingly used both in pre-clinical and clinical research, but lacks software tools that can be adapted to various research environments," says Tommi Pisto, CEO of MediSapiens, in a statement. "Our flexible platform and know-how in designing software for demanding bioinformatics environments will be tailored to meet the needs of oncology research at Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals."

- here's the release