The Ascent of Ascenta

It wasn’t a secret that we had the best gene expression databases around, yet for some reason some of you may not have found it. I am glad that you have finally stumbled across it so I will try to explain in as little jargon as possible.

Remember that a long time ago, atleast in the genomic world it seems like that….Gene Logic built these fabulous databases called Bioexpress and Toxexpress on which 150mm dollars were spent. The 22,000 sample Bioexpress was by no chance easy to create. These samples came in from 91 medical centers across the United States and from almost every disease type you may have imagined. While I could keep going on about these disease types, they have more than the oncology, CNS and CVS diseases. These databases went through some of the most stringent QC measures that you may have seen. The brilliant thing about these databases is the annotation on the samples is just about perfect. It seemed to us and to all of the researchers who used it, that this was the natural path to nirvana in the discovery world.

And so started the saga of subscriptions and has continued to fascinate bioinformaticians around the world who use their magic wand, talk to Genesis( the tool around the databases) and come up with some wonderful discoveries.

Along the way, we thought perhaps we could fascinate more than those who live in the world of informatics and guess what we came up with….yup! Ascenta

Ascenta was created with a vision to curate datasets from the Bioexpress database and present it to its users in a manner that would be easy for them to really get value from the power of the databases. And guess what, we thought of this SaaS based application before this was a buzzword. We understood its power and so did our users.

And as we went on this wonderful path, we realized that some of our partners wanted a view of what other researchers around the world were contributing to the vast scientific bowl and so we thought… Why not use the platform of Ascenta and add some of the public domain data.

So we have continued to make this interface easy to use, thanks to the feedback from our lovely customers and critics.

And watch out, the next thing you will hear is that this Ascenta will be fully integrated with our RaaS ( Research as a Service) platform. And if you haven’t yet heard me speak about RaaS, you soon will.