Repositive Launches Patient Derived Xenographs Database
By Bio-IT World Staff
August 8, 2016 | Repositive, a software company developing novel tools to improve access to human genomic research data, is launching a consortia project in collaboration with AstraZeneca to develop a collaborative, pre-competitive platform to provide streamlined discovery and access to molecular data from Patient Derived Xenographs (PDXs) for use within oncology research.
Patient Derived Xenographs (PDXs) are derived by direct implantation of cancerous tissue from a patient into an immunodeficient mouse. It’s a tricky and expensive process, explained Fiona Nielsen, CEO of Repositive, but cancer researchers often prefer PDXs to cancer cell lines because the tumors have not been exposed to the selective pressures, stimuli, damage and genetic evolution resulting from the cell culturing process.
“PDX models are provided by these companies or labs that specialize in making mouse models, but they do not necessarily have a structured way of making data available for those models,” Nielsen said. “When a company likes Astra Zeneca is trying to find out which model to use, they have to go ask each of the PDX vendors, ‘Which of your models has this mutation, and which has that mutation? Could you give me data on this model? Could you give me data on that model?’”
Repositive’s consortium is “taking that load,” Nielsen explained, and collecting and indexing all of the PDX data in one easy-to-search database. “Each of the PDX vendors is doing some sort of website or catalog so you can look at what they have, but [data management] is not their specialty, and… researchers need to research every possible PDX vendor to find out if they have what they need.”
The PDX database will be a premium add-on module to the Repositive platform, a purpose-built platform to improve access to human genomic data that will launch on September 1. “We are happy to apply the Repositive skills in data sourcing and web application development to such immediate beneficial effects to the consortia partners,” Nielsen said in a press release.
The consortium is looking for additional industrial and academic partners to provide improved data and develop new tools for use in improving oncology research. “We already have a number of PDX vendors joining with this collaboration, and we already have interest from two other pharma companies,” Nielsen said.
PDX consortium partners will benefit from early access to the resource and tools as they are being developed, and the features and data availability on the resource will be prioritized according to the needs of the consortia members. Opportunities to extend the resource to immuno-competent tumor models can also be explored.
The Repositive public platform will be free to search, Nielsen explained. “Your average researcher may know maybe four or five public repositories to go look for things, we know of more than 270. We are indexing these on the platform,” she said. “It’s our specialty to identify and characterize the data source and make it easily accessible… let you search for exactly what you need for your researcher purposes.” Specialty query functionality for an organization, or specialty queries into datasets like the PDX dataset are premium services.