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Posted On: 03/07/2005
Spotfire Analytics Platform Making Inroads Into Pharmaceuticals
Spotfire, Inc., a provider of visual analytics for business decision-making, announced it has closed two multi-million dollar enterprise license agreements with top 10 pharmaceutical companies. Spotfire has also introduced DecisionSite 8.1, the latest version of its visual data analytics platform. A Spotfire press release noted, "As the pharmaceutical industry faces increasing pressure in areas such as drug safety, DecisionSite has emerged as a product that addresses all key business processes in life sciences."
DecisionSite 8.1 offers pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical users an end-to-end analysis environment for fast and effective analysis throughout the drug discovery process. The new version enables wider use of DecisionSite across the R&D organization through faster, more flexible data access; enhanced data analysis features; expanded results-sharing capabilities; and improved security and administration.
DecisionSite 8.1 features greater flexibility and higher performance in accessing data from a wide range of research applications and data sources, allowing researchers from various parts of the organization to take advantage of DecisionSite's powerful visual data analysis for any size data sets.
For those researchers looking to share results easily, Spotfire is introducing new functionality in a significant upgrade to DecisionSite's Web-based analysis and communication product: DecisionSite Posters. The upgrade puts more of DecisionSite's interactive capabilities on the Web, allowing for wider sharing of analysis results across researchers throughout the drug discovery chain, including those users who do not use DecisionSite on a daily basis. DecisionSite Posters allows researchers to share results - from gene expression dendograms to drug safety signal detection - in one online application that now supports heat maps, bar charts, pie charts, trellising and text search.
New visualizations allow for better data analysis for those users who want to employ curve fitting and heat maps. When scientists are looking at millions of compounds in a high-throughput screening process, the ability to weed out bad compounds quickly is essential. The new built-in interactive curve fitting provides users with improved predictive analysis capabilities with an interactivity never before seen in IC50 curve fitting. Now, scientists can view and interactively manipulate hundreds of curves at once, and determine compound behaviors at a glance. DecisionSite 8.1 supports dynamic curve fitting in individual or trellised scatter plots using linear, polynomial, power, logarithmic, exponential, and basic IC50 curves as part of its standard product offered to all customers under maintenance. Interactive curves are easy to set up and dynamically respond and update as users filter their experimental data. When communicating insights from a dataset with many columns, such as experimental results from micro arrays, it is important to get a high level view of many different columns. The improved heat map visualization in DecisionSite 8.1 provides overviews and the ability to spot trends from many variables.
"As a company focused on pioneering new approaches for the understanding and treatment of complex diseases, the ability to understand the intricate relationships in data is a necessity," said Bill Ladd, Vice President of Discovery Systems at Genstruct, Inc. "The new improvements in Spotfire 8.1, such as interactive curve fitting and improved heat maps, will allow us to make better data-driven decisions."
DecisionSite 8.1 offers the following improvements to its Information Services to provide more flexibility in the data access, performance and formatting.
- Pivoting - Pivoting data in DecisionSite 8.1 is faster, and supports analyzing very large data sets. Resulting column names are easily configured to meet naming conventions. The resulting column names from pivoting categorical columns into multiple ones are configurable on a system level and editable on the information link level.
- Stored Procedures - In DecisionSite 8.1, users can re-use stored procedures for advanced query and for database write back. A whole new work bench has been added to allow mapping of stored procedures for data retrieval or for Action links that perform database actions without retrieving data. An example of an action can be for the end users to tag bad-quality data directly in the database.
Best Practices Delivered by Major Pharma Leaders
As evidence of Spotfire's continuing momentum in life sciences, the company recently completed Webcasts featuring top developers and system architects from leading pharmaceutical companies, Wyeth and Merck. Presenters discuss how they have integrated interactive, visual data analytics from Spotfire into their research platforms, and discuss the "how's and why's" of their implementation and the resulting benefits to their companies. These presentations, titled "Developing, Testing, and Deploying Spotfire Guides by Biologists" (featuring Maryann Whitley Ph.D., Leader of Expression Profiling Informatics for Wyeth) and "Developing DecisionSite Guides and Tools for a Dynamic User Environment" (featuring Christopher Savage, Associate Systems Analyst, Merck) are complimentary at: http://www.spotfire.com/solutions/life_sciences/ds81.cfm.
Overcoming Data Analysis Bottlenecks
Spotfire launched its Instrumentation Partner Program in the summer of 2004 aimed at helping researchers overcome data analysis bottlenecks by enabling users of DecisionSite to directly access the high volumes of instrumentation data for immediate analysis. Now, users are offered a free software tool that can import and merge instrument data and experimental parameters directly into DecisionSite 8.1, resulting in better quality assurance and control for researchers. Providing direct access to the high volumes of instrumentation data clears a major research hurdle for drug discovery organizations.