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Media Contact: Peter Hussey, (206) 667-7193 or email peter@labkey.com

Grant Awardees Standardize Software Platform for Early Cancer Detection

(Seattle, WA – May 22, 2007) –The Canary Foundation and the LabKey Software Foundation announced today the fifteen grant recipients of their Bioinformatics Platform Dissemination Award. A total of $225,000 in grants is being awarded to key labs around the world. The Canary Foundation and this award advocate the continued development of common software platforms for research on early cancer detection. Most of the funds awarded under these grants will be used to customize and expand the CPAS proteomics platform. CPAS, (Computational Proteomics Analysis System) is based on LabKey Server and is freely available under a non-restrictive open source license from the LabKey Software Foundation (www.labkey.org).

“The Canary Foundation takes a unique approach supporting research on early cancer detection,” said Don Listwin, founder, Canary Foundation. “We know from experience in the commercial world that when all the key labs are using and building on the same software platform, they can focus their efforts on discovering biomarkers for cancer instead of reinventing the wheel. And they can share and validate their findings without going through a lot of hoops. We’re betting that CPAS is going to be one of those platforms, so we offered these grants as a way to accelerate that process.”

The award committee received a higher than expected response to the grant proposal and the proposed projects of a high caliber. “CPAS was designed to make it easy for researchers to share their novel research ideas by integrating them into a common software platform,” said Dr. Martin McIntosh, principal investigator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Institute and chair of the award evaluation committee. “The number and quality of applications we received shows that the research community is highly motivated to share.”

In the end, fifteen grants were awarded in two categories to the following institutions:

Development Awards ($25,000)

Institute	Principal Investigator
Institute for Systems Biology	John Boyle
University of Washington, Dept. of Medicine and School of Pharmacy	Jay Heinecke and David Goodlett
The Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard	D. R. Mani and Stephen Carr
British Columbia Cancer Research Center	Ryan Brinkman
Indiana University, Purdue University and IUPUI	Jake Chen

Installation Awards ($10,000)

Institute	Principal Investigator
Functional Proteomics Center, KIST, Korea	Myeong-Hee Yu
University of Texas, MD Anderson Cancer Center, Dept of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology	Romesh Stanislaus
Barnett Institute, Northeastern University	Barry Karger and William Hancock
Vermont Genetics Network Proteomics Facility, University of Vermont	Dwight Matthews and Jeffrey Bond
Biomolecular Resource Center, UCSF	Richard Niles
University of Essex, England	Metodi Metodiev
University of British Columbia	Chris Overall
Wright Laboratory, UC Davis	Mike Wright
Protein Center, Memorial Sloane Kettering	Paul Tempst
UCLA, Graeber and Wohlschlegel Labs	Thomas Graeber and James Wohlschlegel

Most of the award funds will be used for design, development, integration and support services provided by LabKey Corporation (www.labkey.com). All software developed under these grants will be contributed to the open source project managed by the LabKey Software Foundation.

CPAS is an open source proteomics data analysis and data management platform. CPAS is the result of a collaboration lead by the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, and included the Institute for Systems Biology, and Beavis Bioinformatics. It includes a large number of proteomics data processing tools, which are integrated by LabKey Server.

LabKey Server refers to the core architecture and platform used to integrate and manage research data such as that generated by the proteomics data analysis tools included in CPAS. In addition to CPAS, LabKey Server also supports platform applications for managing flow cytometry experiments and large observational studies. LabKey Server is updated regularly, with version 2.1 expected by the end of this month.

CPAS and LabKey Server were developed through funding by the National Cancer Institute, the Fred Hutchinson Center, and the Canary Foundation.

About LabKey Software Foundation

LabKey Software Foundation is an independent not-for-profit organization, formed to own and manage the LabKey open source project and its distribution. LabKey Software Foundation holds copyright to all source code in the project and licenses it to third parties under terms of the Apache Software License. The foundation is controlled by its members. Members include developers from both for-profit and not-for-profit institutes who integrate their work into the LabKey platform.

About LabKey Corporation

The LabKey Corporation was formed to provide professional development and support services for LabKey Server and its associated platform applications. LabKey platform applications are designed in collaboration with scientific experts and developed using commercial-level software practices. Labkey is located in Seattle, Wash.

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