3/2/2010

IntOGen: An innovative system for Integrative OncoGenomics

HFSP Career Development Award holder Nuria Lopez-Bigas and colleagues

The Biomedical Genomics laboratory at University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, http://bg.upf.edu, led by Nuria López–Bigas, has developed an innovative system for the analysis and integration of vast amounts of cancer genomics data. The results generated by this system, called IntOGen, can be accessed at www.intogen.org. The journal Nature Methods has published recently un article with the description of this new tool: "IntOGen: Integration and data-mining of multidimensional oncogenomic data".

The study of cancer has changed significantly in the last years with the advent of high-throughput technologies to study genomic alterations in cancer samples. The accumulation of the vast amount of oncogenomic data produced to date, together with new, large-scale projects such as The Cancer Genome Atlas and the International Cancer Genome Consortium imply the need to develop new strategies for integration, data-mining and visualization of all this data in a biologically meaningful way in order to get insights into the mechanisms of cancer development.

IntOGen is a novel framework that collects, analyzes and integrates genome-wide experiments that study several types of alterations in different human cancer types. The current version contains almost 800 independent experiments. IntOGen system incorporates a powerful and intuitive web interface (www.intogen.org), designed to be a discovery tool for cancer research.

In summary, IntOGen.org is a unique and highly valuable resource for the cancer research community that facilitates the interrogation of a substantial amount of data from genome-wide analyses.

Reference:
Gundem G, Perez-Llamas C, Jene-Sanz A, Kedzierska A, Islam A, Deu-Pons J, Furney S and Lopez-Bigas N. IntOGen: Integration and data-mining of multidimensional oncogenomic data. Nature Methods 7, 92-93 (2010).