Vall d’Hebrón Research Institute and Anaxomics Biotech join forces to move systems biology towards clinical practice

The Vall d' Hebron Research Institute (VHIR) and Anaxomics Biotech have signed an agreement to facilitate the use of systems biology in research groups at the VHIR, thus moving this innovative approach towards normal clinical practice.

Systems biology integrates all information on a patient into a single analysis, including both clinical data (clinical profile, treatment received, results of routine marker analyses) and “omic” data obtained through proteomic, genomic and metabolomic studies. The cost of the latter is falling significantly and is often essential to research projects. The problem doctors and researchers normally find is how to integrate all of the information available for a single patient, often composed of unconnected data and experiments, to later interpret the results. Systems biology aims to help better understand what is happening and why. Integrating and analyzing all this information holistically requires expert analysts with specific tools and training, which professionals with more clinical profiles often don’t have.

Analysis of patient profiles using systems biology techniques is already being done at world-renowned hospitals like the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and Mount Sinai in New York, where they are part of the protocol for selecting treatment for patients with some types of cancer.

The VHIR Unit of High Technology (UAT) aims to offer researchers the most advanced tools to support biomedical research, including analysis of omic data obtained using high-performance technology. This agreement between Anaxomics and VHIR expands the UAT portfolio of services, making it possible to integrate a huge amount of data of varying types and origins for a single patient.

Through this agreement, Anaxomics will offer VHIR researchers a la carte consultancy services in order to identify molecular mechanisms associated with a disease or drug based on the integration of clinical and molecular-biology databases. Moreover, they have developed an automatized service through the Simscells online platform that allows researchers to enter their experimental data and do simple analyses.

As Anaxomics CEO José Manuel Mas explains, "even when a drug works correctly for two patients, the mechanism of action for this drug may not be identical in both. In fact it probably won’t be. These variations in mechanism of action between different patients make a drug more or less effective or can lead to possible side effects. Now we have tools to start looking at what happens in each patient and we’re making them available to doctors and researchers." VHIR Director Joan Comella says, “As Vall d'Hebron is a benchmark in translational biomedical research, offering our researchers this type of technology is key to fostering better understanding of the molecular mechanisms that, when altered, cause different pathologies, as well as improving personalized treatment of patients depending on their particular characteristics."