ISB Takes 1st Place in YarcData Contest
isbscience.org/news/2013/04/05/isb-takes-1st-place-in-yarcdata-contest/
Screengrab from pubcrawl.isbscience.net/ydc
Dr. Brady Bernard, Andrea Eakin, and Dr. Ilya Shmulevich, of The Institute for Systems Biology (ISB), were awarded first prize and will split $70,000 for their winning entry researching more than 25 different types of cancers and thousands of patients to gain insight into the biological networks that are disrupted or altered within a given cancer type and to identify potentially potent approved drugs that could be repurposed for the given cancer.
The winning solution combined unstructured data from medical articles with structured data from genomic and proteomic databases. Using YarcData’s uRiKA graph analytics appliance, this team combined these disparate data sources into a powerful tool for scientific discovery enabling researchers to formulate a theory, quickly test it against all available data, and interactively refine the hypothesis.
“In the amount of time it takes to explore one hypothesis, we can now explore thousands of hypotheses, massively improving our success rate,” said Dr. Ilya Shmulevich, Professor, Institute for Systems Biology. “Our queries needed to cross multiple genes and diverse cancer datasets, producing results in seconds to queries several pages long on graphs of billions of edges. Before YarcData, it has not been possible to perform this type of large scale analysis and identify complex multivariate relationships in heterogeneous data.”
