Mining ‘omics data to find biomarkers of cancer

US-based researchers win federal grant to further research on statistical tools for mining large sets of data from cancer patients.

Researchers from Rice University, Baylor College of Medicine and University of Texas (TX, USA) have recently won a US$1.3 million grant to work on a statistical framework to allow the analysis of large datasets complied by the NIH on cancer patient profiles.

The data includes various ‘omics categories – including genomic, proteomic and metabolic data, from analysis such as gene-expression microarrays and methylation arrays. The researchers have taken on the substantial task of making sense of this data, which is found in various forms such as continuous, count and binary.

Project lead Genevera Allen, a statistician at both Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine, explained that the influx of “new high-throughput medical technologies that allow clinicians to produce tons of molecular data” was their motivation in developing these statistical tools.

Source: New statistical tools being developed for mining cancer data.