Powering proteomics
27 Jun 2001
Caprion Pharmaceuticals is to collaborate with Sun, Oracle and CGI to develop and operate a bioinformatics platform for proteomic disease modelling.
Hardware and software from Sun Microsystems and Oracle, and systems integration expertise from CGI, will be combined with Caprion's cell biology and mass spectrometry techniques to analyze, map and store the protein differences between normal and diseased cells.
Caprion's CellCarta Solaris platform will include servers, storage and software from Sun and Oracle. The combination will enable Caprion to study proteins within cells by creating comprehensive three-dimensional maps showing the location and orientation of proteins in their biological context. Caprion uses mass spectrometers to digitize cellular information in multiple states, identifying and modelling disease. A data warehouse will be designed and developed by Oracle Consulting.
Caprion hopes to accelerate the detection of disease-related proteins through the creation of a specialized data centre. This centre, expected to be operational in September, 2001, will process up to 100 terabytes of information per year and, Caprion claims, will represent one of the largest and fastest dedicated protein analysis server banks in the world.
With the completion of a rough draft of the human genetic code, researchers are now launching large-scale efforts to study proteins, a field known as proteomics. Proteins carry information within and between cells, and carry out most of life's basic processes. Proteomics is expected to lead to advances in treating HIV, cancer and other diseases.
