Agilent, Strand unveil microarray bioinformatics platform

Agilent Technologies Inc, a US-based over $5.4-billion measurement company, along with life science informatics innovation firm Strand Life Sciences, on Tuesday launched its flagship microarray bioinformatics platform – Agilent GeneSpring GX 10.0.

GeneSpring GX offers tools for systems-level data interpretation and pathway analysis and enables scientists to attain new insights into the underlying mechanism of a disease or biological process.

Agilent had signed an agreement with Strand last year to develop upgrades to GeneSpring, a desktop gene expression analysis tool. Strand previously had a similar relationship with Stratagene, which Agilent had acquired in June 2007.

Agilent has decided to switch its in-house GeneSpring development efforts to Strand two months later and GeneSpring GX 10.0 is a result of this collaboration, Sanjiv Dhar, sales head (life sciences and chemical analysis group), Agilent Technologies India, stated in a press release.

This edition will address growth of systems-level studies in genomics research. GeneSpring has been consistent at gene expression data analysis. It has now evolved into an integrated software package that helps scientists discover the relationship between the data and the biological events occurring in their samples, he added.

GeneSpring is a step towards an analytics standard in systems biology, said Vijay Chandru, chairman and chief executive officer of Strand. The new edition of GeneSpring adds visualisation and analysis tools for applications and has powerful pathway analysis capabilities. It provides a database of gene product interactions to enable the scientists build biological interaction networks from genes of their interest.