New software may improve odds of drug discovery

Mass High Tech takes a look at a number of research institutions and start-up companies that have been honing their bioinformatics skills to help improve developers' (miserable) odds in advancing new therapeutics.

One of the start-ups, Immuneering, has a modeling app that takes blood and tumor samples from patients to help determine if a new drug can rev up an individual's immune system to defeat a disease. And Bio-Tree Systems is mapping vascular networks and blood vessels at a microscopic level to better analyze the impact a drug has on the blood vessels of a patient's tumor.

"This is a very insightful application of computer software to create images from a signal," Burt Adelman at Brigham and Women's Hospital tells Mass High Tech. Bio-Trees technology has the potential to become a "very useful adjunct to discovery and early product development. It gives you a very detailed picture of the vasculature in the tumor."

But there's plenty more in the works as well. The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute recently unveiled plans to open the Center for Cancer Computational Biology to further advance the field of bioinformatics.

- read the report from Mass High Tech