JMP Hosts Researchers at MAQC Conference
More than 100 scientists from academic, governmental and business organizations around the world met at SAS recently as part of a study aimed at perfecting the use of DNA microarray technology to personalize medical treatment. Researchers from as far away as Japan, China and Europe attended the meeting of the MicroArray Quality Control (MAQC) Consortium, hosted by JMP May 24 and 25.
Russ Wolfinger, SAS Director of Scientific Discovery and Genomics, JMP Developers Wenjun Bao and Tzu-Ming Chu, and SAS Developers Padraic Neville, Pei-Yi Tan and Mark Lambrecht are MAQC members and attended the meeting. The MAQC study is sponsored by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
SAS co-founder John Sall noted SAS’ “long commitment to life sciences analytics” when he welcomed participants Thursday morning in the auditorium of Building V. “SAS Institute likes problems with lots of data,” Sall said. “Little did we know when we got into problems involving microarrays that it would challenge our own limits and stretch us to support hundreds of thousands of columns and wide data formats.”
Leming Shi, PhD, coordinates the MAQC initiative and is a Principal Investigator at the FDA’s National Center for Toxicological Research. He praised the facilities offered by SAS and also complimented new features in JMP Genomics 3.0, released just this week. “I just saw some nice new functions for genotyping and SNP analysis," Shi said. "That's something I am very interested in using, as the Genome-Wide Association Working Group has just been established under MAQC."
Between two full days of meetings, participants had dinner at Prestonwood Country Club and toured the SAS campus. Several attendees asked whether the group might meet at SAS again next year, at the conclusion of the study’s second phase.
The first phase of the MAQC study showed that this relatively new technology yields results that are sufficiently reliable and reproducible to warrant a second phase of critical investigation. Now, in phase two, MAQC researchers are determining whether various genomic "biomarkers" can reliably predict how a disease is likely to progress in a certain patient, and which drug should produce the safest and best treatment result in that patient. One new breast cancer diagnostic technology derived from microarrays, MammaPrint, recently received FDA approval.
Russ Wolfinger, SAS Director of Scientific Discovery and Genomics, makes a point during the recent MAQC conference.
Additional Links
MicroArray Quality Control (MAQC) Consortium
