‘Addressing Global Challenges’ – One Year On

As part of the Royal Society of Biology’s #BiologyWeek 2018, Fios featured in a programme titled ‘Addressing Global Challenges’. The aim of ‘Addressing Global Challenges’ was to highlight how the life sciences sector relates to worldwide challenges. Many different areas of the life sciences were represented, with profiles from both industry and academia featured in the hour-long show.

In our section of the hour-long programme, our Chairman, Alan Johnson, CEO, Dr Sarah Lynagh, and Head of Research and Development, Dr Dan Halligan, were interviewed, showcasing our role as a bioinformatics provider. The programme showed how Fios creates meaningful information from complex datasets. The amount of data being produced in many different forms poses a complex challenge for analysis – both for large pharmaceutical companies and smaller businesses.

The Benefits of Being Platform and Data-Agnostic

At Fios, we are uniquely placed to help our clients. With no wet-lab facilities but numerous close links with data generation providers, we are platform-agnostic. By not being tied to certain brands, we are able to work with data from any machine, ensuring that those who come to us are able to generate the data that works best for their research – and we can analyse it to ensure the answers are meaningful for their questions. This becomes ever-more important as more types of analysis methods enter the market. By working with data from multiple platforms, our propriety pipelines can be harnessed and repurposed for any type of data.

Additionally, as well as being platform-agnostic, we are data type-agnostic. Although we are called Fios Genomics, we do not only work with genomics data. From flow cytometry data to proteomics data, we work with most types of biological outputs. This allows us to effectively and efficiently marry multiple datatypes together, to provide a more holistic and rounded view from a research study.

One Year On: The Challenge is Still There

In our section of the ‘Addressing Global Challenges’ programme, we spoke about the worldwide challenge of finding new therapies for diseases. This challenge has not abated. Fios help to both analyse if research endpoints have been met and find biomarkers for new drugs. We can also help repurpose current therapies on the market to see if they can work on new targets – which is a key area of research for many companies, especially with those who already have approval for their drug for a certain disease or indication. This repurposing effort is beneficial to both the pharmaceutical companies and patients who may be able to benefit from a repurposed drug that has already been proven safe through trials.

One year on from the programme, our publication record has continued to grow. Work we completed has been featured in Nature Neuroscience and The Lancet Oncology, amongst others. Posters at both AACR and ESMO in 2019 featured our work, more information can be found on our Case Studies and Posters page. We have also published our first white paper, “An Introduction to the Microbiome: Challenges and Resolutions for Research”.

Watch our segment now: [4min 43s]