AltraBio provides expertise in state-of-the-art and innovative life science data analysis and interpretation.

In contrast to the challenges of the past, the bottleneck of life science research and development has shifted from data generation to analysis and interpretation of these data.

Expertise in the analysis and interpretation of life science data

With a team of highly skilled professionals whose expertise spans the fields of biology, medicine, statistics and informatics, AltraBio is well positioned to understand and address the complex data problems encountered by life science professionals. With an extensive background in statistical modelling, data mining and software/database design, AltraBio makes the most of microarray (gene expression, SNP, ChIP on chip) and clinical trial data and interprets the results in the context of current biomedical knowledge.

Microarray and clinical trial data analysis

Building on the BioConductor software packages, AltraBio uses both time-proven and cutting-edge data analysis methodologies.

Applying its expertise to a wide variety of large-scale biological data sets ranging from microarray data through to clinical trial information, AltraBio performs extensive quality control to identify potential outliers and check for consistency with the design, thus ensuring the relevance and quality of downstream analyses.

AltraBio then provides the complete range of preprocessing and statistical analysis services relevant to all current microarray technologies (identification of differentially expressed genes, SNP associations, detection of ChIP on chip enriched regions, multiple testing correction, etc.) or clinical trials (power estimation, survival estimation, log rank test, Cox model, complex statistical models, etc.).

Interpretation of biological research results

Identification of relevant covariates is only one step of a successful biological research experiment, especially in the fields of differential gene expression or SNP association studies where hundreds or thousands of these covariates can be significant.

Using the integrative, biological pathway-oriented approach, AltraBio analysts go beyond the initial analysis output and interpret these results in the context of the biological problem the experiment addresses. The final result of AltraBio’s work is a comprehensive report summarizing the experimental observations, discussing the biological mechanisms underlying the observed effects and, where appropriate, suggesting follow-up experiments to further elaborate on the results.

Patient population structuring

Characterization of patient populations is of key importance for evaluation of treatment response as well as for establishment of novel diagnostic and predictive criteria. To complement the established methods of supervised and unsupervised classification, AltraBio has developed novel semi-supervised approaches that relax the strong constraints usually imposed on the populations (e.g. healthy/diseased) and allow for detection of additional, previously unidentified, subgroups where appropriate.

AltraBio can apply this approach to identify panels of biomarker candidates characterizing such subpopulations and to identify new diagnostic and predictive patient classes that are distinct from previously established categories and are based on understanding of the molecular mechanisms of pathology or drug response.