An integrated platform for analyzing molecular-biological data within clinical studies

Abstract

To investigate molecular-biological causes and effects of diseases and their therapies it becomes increasingly important to combine data from clinical trials with high volumes of experimental genetic data and annotations. We present our approach to integrate such data for two large collaborative cancer research studies in Germany. Our platform interconnects a commercial study management system (eRN) with a data warehouse-based gene expression analysis system (GeWare). We utilize a generic approach to import different anonymized pathological and patient-related annotations into the warehouse. The platform also integrates different forms of experimental data and public molecular-biological annotation data and thus supports a wide range of genetic analyses for both clinical and non-clinical parameters. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.