Bioincubator

Netex Life Sciences offers a dynamic and stimulating environment for entrepreneurs and young innovative companies developing their activities in the Life Sciences sector. Netex Life Sciences is centrally located in the Eglinton & DVP area of Toronto, Ontario with close proximity to an extensive knowledge base which includes MaRS Discovery District, University of Toronto and University Health Network. In addition to scientific and computational support, Netex Life Sciences provides young entrepreneurs and start-up companies with professional business support including finding funding to grow your business.

The driving force that makes Netex Life Sciences stand alone atop the life sciences field is the varied wealth of experience and knowledge that our technology team has amassed and has available to them. Led and directed by Fuad Gwadry, our team has over 15 years of research and experience in bioinformatics and related areas.

Hardware Integration

Netex Life Sciences Solutions: Advancing Research and Discovery through Information Technology:

Dramatic advances occurring in the Life Sciences industry are changing the way we live.

These advances fuel the rapid scientific discoveries in genomics, proteomics and molecular biology that serve as the basis for medical breakthroughs, the advent of personalized medicine and the development of new drugs and treatments. The sequenced human genome has already increased the number of biological drug “targets” that can be explored from about 500 to over 30,000. Soon, the typical Life Sciences company will need to access and analyze “petabytes” (1015 bytes) of data to further their research efforts.

In addition to the enormity of the data, there are challenges related to querying non-standard data formats, accessing data assets across global networks and securing data outside firewalls. The competitive advantage belongs to companies that can best use information technology (IT) solutions to capitalize on the opportunities presented by this transformation.

Big Data

Computational simulations and experiments in life sciences naturally result in large volumes of data. The ability to effectively manage and analyze this data could be the difference between success and utter failure.

Netex Life Sciences is able to provide expertise in this area using industry standard tools such as Hadoop, Hive and Pig. We are also capable of developing custom solutions specifically tailored to your data analysis pipeline.

Bioinformatics

We provide complete “END to END” solutions for next-generation sequencing and microarray on various platforms.

Selected publications using microarray technologies.

Ghahramani Seno MM, Hu P, Gwadry FG, Pinto D, Marshall CR, Cassalloa G, Scherer SW. Gene and miRNA Expression Profiles in Autism Spectrum Disorders. Brain Res. 2011 Mar 22;1380:85-97. PMID: 20868653

Bussey K, Chin K, Lababidi S, Reimers M, Reinhold WC, Kuo W, Gwadry FG, Ajay, et al. Integrating data on DNA copy number with gene expression levels and drug sensitivities in the NCI-60 Cell Line Panel. Mol Cancer Ther, 2006 Apr; 5(4):853-67. PMID: 16648555

Lee JK, Bussey KJ, Gwadry FG, Reinhold W, Riddick G, Pelletier SL, Nishizuka S, Szakacs G, Annereau JP, Shankavaram U, Lababidi S, Smith LH, Gottesman MM, Weinstein JN. Comparing cDNA and oligonucleotide array data: concordance of gene expression across platforms for the NCI-60 cancer cells. Genome Biol. 2003;4(12):R82. PMID: 14659019

Nishizuka S, Chen ST, Gwadry FG, Alexander J, Major SM, Scherf U, Reinhold WC, Waltham M, Charboneau L, Young L, Bussey KJ, Kim S, Lababidi S, Lee JK, Pittaluga S, Scudiero DA, Sausville EA, Munson PJ, Petricoin EF 3rd, Liotta LA, Hewitt SM, Raffeld M, Weinstein JN. Diagnostic markers that distinguish colon and ovarian adenocarcinomas: identification by genomic, proteomic, and tissue array profiling. Cancer Res. 2003 Sep 1;63(17):5243-50. PMID: 14500354

Upcoming publication on next-generation sequencing technologies.

Renaud Y, Gwadry FG, Daghrach A, Lemieux Perreault LP, Langlois M, Mailloux L, Mongrain I, Blazejczyk M, Dubé MP. Contribution of alignment, post-alignment and variant-calling procedures on the accuracy of next-generation sequencing pipelines (submitted).

Next-generation sequencing (NGS) is a most effective way to screen for single nucleotide variants (SNVs) and small insertions and deletions (INDELs). The accurate detection of these variants is essential for clinical and research applications of NGS. One of the major challenges of NGS is the bioinformatics bottleneck for read alignment to the reference genome, postalignment processing and variant-calling. There are multiple tools for each of the steps and each have their strengths and weaknesses which can affect the quality of SNV calling. Depending on the sequencing technology the choice of tools and steps will impact the accuracy of variant calls.

Chemoinformatics

Netex Life Sciences assisted in the development of Cyclica’s (http://cyclicarx.com/) novel in-silico drug testing platform. Their platform accesses biological and chemical databases that help researchers anticipate and predict a drug candidate’s side effects in the early stages of drug development.
In addition to software development, Netex Life Sciences built a High Performance Computer cluster that allowed Cyclica to greatly improve and control their processes.