Quartz Bio announces positive results for MegaClust platform

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17.10.2013

Quartz Bio SA announced very positive results for MegaClust, the platform developed jointly with the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and Geneva Bioinformatics (GeneBio) SA for the analysis of flow cytometry data.

The MegaClust analysis platform was developed and implemented to provide unbiased in-depth analysis of flow cytometry data. Flow cytometry is becoming indispensable in assessing the safety and efficacy of drugs in clinical trials and also a means to identify biomarkers for patient stratification. Up to now, such analysis was a hurdle for pharmaceutical companies and clinical research organisations, as clinical flow cytometry experiments generally contain a large number of samples collected from multiple sources, making the curation and manual analysis time consuming, not systematic, and therefore error-prone.

Resulting from a joint effort between Quartz Bio, the SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics and GeneBio, MegaClust allows today to perform an automated, unbiased and thorough identification of phenotypically similar cell populations in large datasets consisting of many samples. The technology allows reliable quantitative cross sample analyses and therefore provides a very powerful tool to stratify individuals and/or to analyze variations in cell subpopulations upon stimulations and candidate treatments.

“We have benchmarked MegaClust performance against clinical standards for flow cytometry data analysis and are very impressed,” said Jérôme Wojcik, founder and CEO of Quartz Bio. “MegaClust achieved comparable quality as manual gating strategies and was in addition capable of identifying additional Quality Control problems undetected by classical approaches. We believe that the automated and systematic quality control of all files of a flow cytometry experiment enabled by MegaClust is the first instrumental step for a high-quality analysis. For those reasons, we are excited to keep collaborating with SIB and GeneBio in order to support our customer’s Precision Medicine projects with MegaClust”.

Announced earlier this year, this collaboration which brings together Quartz Bio’s expertise in clinical data analysis and the bioinformatics expertise of SIB reflects once more the need to join forces and expertises to analyse the increasing amount of life science data produced today and pave the way to new breakthroughs. “We are delighted by the conclusion of the MegaClust validation performed by Quartz Bio as it highlights the benefit of a robust, state of the art technology developed by SIB,” said Ioannis Xenarios, director of Vital-IT.

MegaClust is financially supported by the Commission for Technology and Innovation (KTI/CTI), the innovation promotion agency of the Swiss Confederation.

Quartz Bio is a service company specialized in the computational analysis of biomarker data from clinical trials. Quartz Bio is a spin-off of Merck Serono founded in 2012 and based in Geneva. All employees have 6 to 10 years of clinical bioinformatics experience in a pharmaceutical company. The capital of the company is entirely owned by its employees.

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