The Bioanalytics Group LLC Announces New Data Management Sytem

The BioAnalytics Group LLC has announced the newest release of its data management system, BioPathwise DM™ version 2.4. The development of the BioPathwise™ suite reflects ongoing, successful collaboration between The BioAnalytics Group, The National Institute of Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), The Program for Immune Modeling Experimentation (PRIME), and Stockholm-based Contur Software.

The PRIME collaboration, led by Dr. Stuart Sealfon of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, brings together researchers from Princeton, Yale, and Ohio State Universities to conduct experimentation on dendritic cells, biological modeling, and educational programs. The collaborators have generated a cache of new, well-annotated data, analysis, and analytical tools.

A major goal of the program is to build a repository and tools to make the models, data, and techniques accessible to the immunology research community. The BioAnalytics Group developed BioPathwise™ DM to simplify the task of recording, annotating, and locating data for both researchers and developers of novel analysis tools.

"Most scientists still keep paper laboratory notebooks to describe their experiments," says BioAnalytics Group CEO G. Scott Lett, Ph D. "Researchers who want to track their annotations electronically must do so manually- even if they collect raw data through existing software tools or spreadsheets. PRIME was successful in significantly expanding the amount of data captured electronically by using the Contur ELN electronic notebook."

By integrating BioPathwise™ DM with the Contur ELN, the team has automated the process of quickly capturing data and transmitting it into the valuable shared PRIME repository. They are beginning to share project data with the wider research community.

Working directly with active researchers has been instrumental in driving the development of BioPathwise DM. "Throughout the program, the NIAID and all of the PRIME partners have provided information and feedback about their goals, bottlenecks and challenges," says Dr. Lett. "As they adopted new laboratory technologies and developed new methods, the collaborators experienced a substantial increase in the variety of data contributed to the PRIME repository."

The BioAnalytics Group development team has integrated commonly used applications and laboratory devices with BioPathwise DM including qPCR, image data, microarrays and flow cytometry. "The best part is that the system is user-extensible; if a laboratory installs a new type of equipment, a researcher can create a new template in just a few minutes," says Dr. Lett.

In addition to the PRIME program, BioPathwise and BioPathwise DM have been used in research at Johnson & Johnson, Roche, Merck, and Novartis. Emerging companies also benefit from its low cost and high flexibility. Brighter Ideas, Prescient Medical, and others have used BioPathwise DM to share data from their novel technologies with collaborators.

Scientists at institutions such as the University of Arizona, the University of Cincinnati, and Rutgers University find that BioPathwise tools fit well with their research and educational goals. "Like the PRIME researchers, these groups need flexible, inexpensive and truly useful tools to help them complete their work" says Dr. Lett.