The Children's Hospital Of Philadelphia Uses IDBS To Improve Understanding Of Childhood Diseases

Main Category: Pediatrics / Children's Health
Article Date: 22 Oct 2009 - 2:00 PST

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IDBS, the leading worldwide provider of research data management and analytics solutions to R&D organizations, today announced that The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), one of the leading pediatric hospitals and research facilities in the world, has implemented the InforSense-based Translational Research Solution to advance the understanding of complex genetic disease. Using the solution, CHOP can more easily define and run studies to identify relevant gene variants or link a diseased gene with a complex trait that causes or triggers certain childhood diseases and conditions including cancer, diabetes, asthma, and autism.

Using the Translational Research Solution, researchers at CHOP can interactively build a custom phenotype (or patient group) based on multiple dimensions of patient data from nearly 90,000 patient records and get immediate, transparent results. Once the comparative groups are identified, researchers use the solution to integrate with existing PLINK programs to analyse genetic data from Illumina and Affymetrix genotyping platforms. Results are displayed in interactive web based views, which can automatically link to additional annotation from metabolic pathway databases, public databases, and scientific literature. Because the process is smooth and intuitive, principal investigators (PI) or researchers can perform all activities without requiring support from IT, thus accelerating the pace of research.

"Using this software helps make our research much more manageable and transparent, and we are better able to mine the deep and rich data at our disposal," said Hakon Hakonarson, M.D., Ph.D., Director of the Center for Applied Genomics, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. "Having both clinical and genomics components, it easily integrates with our existing infrastructure and gives us the technical functionality and the transparency we need to further our research."

"We are delighted to be working with The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in such an important research area," said Neil Kipling, Founder and CEO of IDBS. "The capability of the InforSense solutions means that PIs can seamlessly combine clinical and genomic data and discover subtleties in patient populations that support the improved understanding of complex multigenic diseases."

About The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was founded in 1855 as the nation's first pediatric hospital. Through its long-standing commitment to providing exceptional patient care, training new generations of pediatric healthcare professionals and pioneering major research initiatives, Children's Hospital has fostered many discoveries that have benefited children worldwide. Its pediatric research program is among the largest in the country, ranking second in National Institutes of Health funding. In addition, its unique family-centered care and public service programs have brought the 430-bed hospital recognition as a leading advocate for children and adolescents.

Source
IDBS