Grant: Project Grant

Flow cytometry (FCM) is the predominant technique used to identify and quantify the widest variety of cell types. It plays critical roles in the characterization and diagnosis of cancer, blood diseases, and immune system disorders by basic researchers, clinicians and pharmaceutical companies as part of clinical trials. Recent technological progress on multicolour FCM results in the generation of vast amounts of high-dimensional data at the single cell level. However, manual analysis using commercial tools, is time consuming (an hour a file, with clinical trials having over 10,000 files) and the largest source of variation in results. As a result, manual data analysis is a critical bottleneck in the application of FCM. We have internationally recognized expertise addressing the challenges associated with FCM data processing, having developed and published a comprehensive suite bioinformatics algorithms for high throughput FCM analysis. Many of our approaches have been evaluated as best in the world through peer-reviewed open competitions. We have a startup that after only one full calendar year has contracted with 6/10 of the world's top pharmaceutical companies to provide clinical trial data analysis. We propose to scale up our ability to process client data by taking our academically developed infrastructure and transitioning it into a robust and automated system that is integrated into FDA-certified software currently used by clinical labs.