I happened to run across a software company called LabKey recently. A former colleague of mine from way back when, Adam Rauch, started doing work at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center a few years ago where he developed a system for analysing mass spectrometry data. Adam was one of the original team at Microsoft that created Visual Basic and went on to create some other pretty amazing products there.
LabKey developed the CPAS (Computational Portal and Analysis System) software as an open source science project offering web-based bioinformatics and collaboration tools to help scientists store, analyze, and share data from high-throughput experiments and observational studies. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center uses CPAS to manage the Computational Proteomics Laboratory (CPL) Proteomics Repository containing over 200 million putative MS2 peptides, growing at 3 million per week. This helps address the issue of early early cancer detection, which is one of the key issues in treating cancer.
The key goals of CPAS are:
- Handle high throughput processing and analysis fo results
- Automate and control data pipleine from instruments to analysis
- Provide universal access to results and support collaboration
- Keep data private and secure
- Allow mining across runs, experiments and samples
- Make it easy to install, administer and use
- Support popular platforms and servers
- Use public file formats
CPAS is available as free, installable software, with source code under a permissive Apache license. Most of the development is done in Java and they also use a few other open source pieces. I don't know if this software will help find a cure for cancer, but it's a noble goal. This is software that matters.
- LabKey: Home, CPAS software, Jobs
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